Officials from the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) recently told SciDev.Net that they have found high-level policymakers from many nations have a poor understanding of how best to support innovation in firms.
I recently attended an UNCTAD expert meeting on fostering private sector innovation for development. There the agency announced it was launching a programme to train policymakers across the world in how to deploy policies that encourage innovation. At the meeting I met Bart Verspagen, the director of the UN University Maastricht Economic and Social Research Institute on Innovation and Technology. Read more