Introduction

Abstract

In recent decades the newly industrialised economies have experienced intensive technological learning and made remarkable progress in reducing the gap to the developed countries A large part of the studies address the inquiry into emerging-nations technological development by adopting a micro-level perspective nevertheless, just as in the long-industrialised nations, the development of innovation in single firms is closely tied to the local innovation system in which they are inserted. These peculiarities of LISs in developing countries generate much scepticism among scholars about the appropriateness of the entire LIS concept to such national cases. Nevertheless the specificities of innovation systems in developing countries need not be interpreted as failures to conform to the traditional models of LISs. Instead, they should stimulate a reinterpretation of the model in a dynamic mode. The objective of the present work is to resolve the gap in the literature, identifying the characteristics, and particularly the dynamics of formation for innovation systems in developing economies.