Formulating an Agenda for the Measurement of Innovation in the Informal Economy

Charmes, Jacques; Gault, Fred; Wunsch-Vincent, Sacha; Kraemer-Mbula, Erika

doi:10.1017/cbo9781316662076.013

Cited by 23 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…Secondly, the means of conducting the survey in the informal sector in the form of web‐based surveys are unlikely to work as respondents often lack internet access or a postal address for a quick and an effective communication. Though the agenda laid by Charmes et al () in their paper to measure the innovations in the informal sector is quite interesting but it is not applicable in our study. Here, we look in the intellectual property issues with respect to individual grassroots innovators in India.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 97%

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Intellectual property rights and informal sector innovations: Exploring grassroots innovations in India

Sharma

Kumar

2018

World Intellectual Property

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The primary driver for innovations in the formal sector is credited to the institution of patenting. Intellectual property rights (IPRs) as the extrinsic motivational factor have supported innovations by firms and industries which have a large market and resources to commercialise their products. Grassroots innovations, on the other hand, represent a culture of individual innovators outside formal sector who innovate out of adversity, curiosity and needs. Most of the innovators have cited intrinsic motivation behind the innovation and are unaware of IPR.However, there is a paucity of literature on the relation between IPR and innovations in the informal sector. Drawing on the literature on IPR and innovations in the formal sector, we examine whether the same theories and rationales apply to a different nature of innovations in the informal sector. This is an exploratory study and to map the current scenario of patenting for grassroots innovations secondary data were collected from the National Innovation Foundation (NIF) website. To understand the innovators' perception, we interviewed them through various means and on different sites. The study finds that although there was no initial intention to innovate for extrinsic incentives like patenting, there is an increasing trend in filing patents for grassroots innovations by the NIF in India. K E Y W O R D S grassroots innovations, India, informal sector innovations, intellectual property rights, patents

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 97%

“…It is important to mention that surveying the informal economy has its own methodological challenges as pointed out by Charmes, Gault, and Wunsch‐Vincent (). The first and foremost challenge is related to sampling and a lack of a survey frame to draw the sample from.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Intellectual property rights and informal sector innovations: Exploring grassroots innovations in India

Sharma

Kumar

2018

World Intellectual Property

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“…This presents opportunities for STI that are adequately reconceptualized in a way that ensures that STI is relevant to wider societies. We know that a large section of the African economy is informal (ILO 2009(ILO , 2012Charmes, Gault, and Wunsch-Vincent 2015). A significant amount of innovation activity in the continent, as in the wider Global South, draws from indigenous knowledge, occurs in informal settings, and is largely ignored in innovation, development, and management studies (Kraemer-Mbula and Wamae 2010;Godfrey 2011;Cozzens and Sutz 2012).…”

Section: Africa: What We Already Knowmentioning

confidence: 99%

Smartness from Below: Variations on Technology and Creativity in Contemporary Kinshasa

Pype¹

2017

What Do Science, Technology, and Innovation Mean From Africa?

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of course, D. A. Masolo, whose critique was that Ngugi, Odera-Oruka, and Vansina did not go far enough and left open-after negritude, after Pan-Africanism, after African socialism, and even after the "sage philosophy" that Odera-Oruka actively promoted-the search for new archives and modes of African philosophy. I approached these scholars as a learner, and I was looking to apprentice in the African way, in which elders impart knowledge to the young at close quarters.The debt I owe to Mamadou Diouf for helping me understand the context of the question of the scientific and the technological in Africa from a combined philosophical, historical, contemporary, diagnostic, and prognostic perspective is, quite simply, unpayable. After my textual and face-to-face interactions with the above-mentioned scholars, it became quite clear that the issue at stake for the African reader of technology, the reader of technology in Africa, and better yet African technology, is not just the behavior of science, technology, and innovation but the intellectual work of making things and their strategic deployment. Can one see Africans as intellectuals thinking about and making technology based on intellect?This question was an acknowledgement of what I had witnessed in everyday interactions with people in different parts of Africa, but even more so during my own childhood in Zimbabwe. In people's mobilities I saw an archive, a statement, a critique, and an authoring of thought into reality through practice, operationalized through the movement of legs, hands, mouth, and other body functions. I wanted to locate the subject of conversation upstream of practice, to understand the intellection that drove it. Some micro-movements of and within the body were involuntary; the concern was with the voluntary actions, delegated by the mind-at-work.STS had prepared me to understand one version of science and technology, to recognize it when I saw it. This was a vital skill-but it also turned out to be quite blunt for the nature of knowledge I was looking at. Conventional (Western) STS is good at identifying banal forms of science and technology but is severely limited in non-Western contexts, in which things scientific and things technological are not readily recognizable.Here was the problem in the specific case of Africa. The project of addressing the meanings of science, technology, and innovation from Africa had to be philosophically grounded, because to my understanding the colonial ordering of knowledge had cut up African knowledge, knowledge production, and structures and modes of knowing into tiny pieces. What had once been a whole entity known as a composite was now scattered into specialist disciplines like philosophy, theology/religious studies, African languages and literature, history, economic history, anthropology, and so on. The philosophy I remember being taught in the University of Zimbabwe in the early 1990s was about Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Marx, and so on. Where were the Africans?xii Preface xiv PrefaceAll in all, t...

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Section: Africa: What We Already Knowmentioning

confidence: 99%

What Do Science, Technology, and Innovation Mean from Africa?

Mavhunga¹

2017

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Formulating an Agenda for the Measurement of Innovation in the Informal Economy

Cited by 23 publications

References 4 publications

Intellectual property rights and informal sector innovations: Exploring grassroots innovations in India

Intellectual property rights and informal sector innovations: Exploring grassroots innovations in India

Smartness from Below: Variations on Technology and Creativity in Contemporary Kinshasa

What Do Science, Technology, and Innovation Mean from Africa?

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