Leveraging Competitiveness and Economic Growth through Linking Innovation Systems to Wealth Creation in Emerging Countries

Most industrialized countries have been able to insert innovation into their national agendas, leveraging competitiveness, economic growth and social development. Well structured national innovation systems run across all the innovation value chain: from the transfer of ideas or inventions, to their commercialization as high value and differentiated products or services, producing high economic and social impacts In developing countries, the circumstances are quite different. There are weak liaisons, low trust and poor association between economic generators (companies) and their supporting institutions (government, federations, banks and academies). Regions are not electronically prepared (e-readiness) to support the infrastructure required for the effective formation of clusters (c-readiness). Innovation is not perceived as an asset, and high value entrepreneurship is not a common finding in the entrepreneurial profiles of most professionals. There are no world class industrial enabling conditions, nor high value core capabilities, and the digital economies are creating large digital development divides instead of business opportunities. In general, the economic gap between rich countries and poor ones widens every day. To help alleviate this situation, we have developed the WIT Model (Wealth creation through Innovation and enabling Technologies). This model has been designed to create the necessary and sufficient enabling conditions and core capabilities to empower developing regions to transform their scarce resources and hostile conditions, into attractive regions with competitive industries and innovative companies, capable of producing great added and differential values, strongly interrelated with their regional social capital, so that they can compete globally as extended networks of value, and share their economic value among their local communities. Several cases of application of the model are shown, specially the current project of the Institute for Innovation and Technology Transfer (IITT) planned to position the city of Monterrey, Mexico, as an international Pole of Innovation and Competitiveness.