The competitiveness of firms in a global economic environment is an essential element in development strategy, but simply creating an open economy will not suffice to stimulate competitiveness if innovation is lacking. This is the major finding of this cross-country and multi-industry study...

Both firms, keen to improve their competitiveness, and governments, keen to exploit new sources of economic and social progress, need to understand how innovation works in order to better stimulate it. The paradox of innovation is that it uses co-operation to enhance competition and to link many...

Over the past decade, privatisation has increasingly taken place in the public utility sector. Technological advances and policy shifts have diminished the perception that public utilities are natural monopolies requiring state ownership. However, the privatisation of such state-owned monopolies...

The growth potential of countries increasingly depends on the effectiveness of their innovation systems in creating, diffusing and using knowledge. A large share of market-based or informal knowledge flows occur within industrial clusters that can be seen as reduced-form innovation systems....