South Africa's National System of Innovation

Science, technology and innovation are the spokes of the wheels that drive sustainable economic and social development. In order to achieve economic success, a country needs to harness the collective capacity of all its research, development and innovation efforts at the level of the nation-state. The national system of innovation (NSI) is a concept that provides an organising framework for galvanising policies, institutions and organizations within a country in order to develop a coherent and robust knowledge-driven economy. In a quest to develop a deeper understanding of the NSI, both as a conceptual framework and an organisational reality, this book undertakes, firstly, an ontological critique of the NSI concept. This is followed by an analytical inventory of the institutions, organisations and policies that constitute the NSI. A robust theoretical examination culminates in a characterisation of the NSI that bears the hallmarks of systems, chaos and complexity. To demonstrate the usefulness of a complex perspective of the NSI, a management framework, comprising explicit management actions, is outlined and then summarized in a conceptual device called the Complemanton.