How should governments design public innovation agencies to accommodate the challenges of rapid technological and economic change? In this article, we argue that innovation agencies can approach innovation in very different ways. We develop a typology of innovation agencies, using eight agencies from around the world to identify distinctive patterns of learning, adjustment, and experimentation. In doing so, we demonstrate that the effective design of innovation agencies depends heavily on their mission and the specific ends they seek to pursue.

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This study revisits the debate on trade reform in Latin America, focusing specifically on what combinations of conditions were necessary and sufficient for very rapid trade liberalization. It departs significantly from two types of studies that have been previously used to examine Latin American trade reform: (1) those using large samples and linear statistics to test the mean effects of variables on levels of trade protection and (2) those isolating necessary conditions for rapid reform but using a small number of case studies. Using fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis and short case studies, the study considers trade policy in sixty-one administrations. It finds that a key motivating factor for rapid trade opening is potential resistance from protected industry; it further identifies several other important enabling conditions, such as hyperinflation, devaluation, and an unconstrained executive. In combination, these enabling conditions are sufficient to account for a high percentage of rapid reform episodes.Between the early 1970s and the turn of the twenty-first century, Latin American countries moved away from inward-oriented economic development plans to strategies that emphasized open markets and export-led development. Regionally, this shift

Important product and process innovations are often developed in "public spaces" that promote collaboration and provide shelter from market competition. Given that most collaborative spaces are costly to establish, the possible implications are bleak for economically strapped developing countries. This paper highlights a less conspicuous -if not unknown -source of collaborative space: the regulatory process. Regulators can induce innovation by promoting collaboration across organizational, sectoral, and disciplinary boundaries in the interest of regulatory compliance. This paper documents the innovative consequences of efforts to regulate the use of lead-based glazes in the Mexican ceramics industry and reconsiders several recent studies of upgrading in other countries that appear to have been driven, at least in part, by the regulatory process. Drawing on these cases, this paper makes four primary points: (i) that innovation in regulatory spaces is more common than previously acknowledged and is producing meaningful improvements in product quality and working conditions in developing economies; (ii) that promoting innovation in these regulatory spaces is an important developmental tool for countries that are "regulation-takers" and have many low-tech sectors; (iii) that this dynamic extends current conceptions of regulatory discretion, as well as development literature on state-society synergies; and (iv) that establishing collaborative public spaces as a common conceptual framework is a critical step toward understanding the consequences of social regulation on upgrading.