Background information on DRUID's Conference, Rebild, June 9-12, 1999

Last update: 21 Apr 99

Organisation

The conference is arranged by the Danish Research Unit for Industrial Dynamics (DRUID), a Danish research network financed by the Danish Social Science Research Council, the Danish Ministry of Trade and Industry, and three Danish universities.

The conference will reserve substantial time for plenary sessions, but a large part of the invited speakers will present their papers in parallel thematic sessions. A list of the session themes and session leaders will be sent to all invited speakers. After the conference, the organising committee envisages to edit selected papers for publication as a journal's special issue and maybe also as a book.

Coordination committee

Jan Fagerberg, University of Oslo
Christopher Freeman, SPRU, University of Sussex
Bengt-Åke Lundvall, DRUID, Aalborg University
Richard R. Nelson, Columbia University
Esben S. Andersen, DRUID, Aalborg University

Themes of the conference

It is now a little more than ten years ago since three of the organisers of the conference (Freeman, Lundvall and Nelson) suggested that the analysis of national innovation systems is an important part of the research agenda on industrial dynamics and economic growth. A few years later came the results of more ambitious academic projects, and at present there is an increasingly wide range of activities which span from academic journals to more or less systematic innovation systems studies in individual countries as well as in international organisations.

The results of the studies of national innovation systems and of other types of innovation system are manyfold but also in several respects difficult to handle and develop theoretically, empirically, and politically. In this setting, the purpose of this DRUID conference is to sum up and bring forward the debate in three dimensions: theoretical foundations, empirical mapping, and political relevance.

The conference is for invited speakers only. We invite papers that explicitly and systematically relate the national innovation system concept to theory, indicators and policy as well as papers that analyse specific cases or pursue comparative studies using the concept. We also invite papers that relate concepts such as sectoral, regional and corporate innovation systems to the understanding of national innovation systems.

The present state of the art implies that the invited speakers should note that there is especially a need for papers that:

• provide a conceptual development of the ideas of (national) innovation systems, not least in an interaction between evolutionary approaches and systems approaches
• provide models of industrial and economic dynamics that help to clarify the role and problems of innovation systems, including their disconnectedness from or embeddedness in the system of national economies
• present the new empirical sources for studies of innovation systems, methodological reflections about them, as well as the attempts to exploit the new sources by means of econometric or more qualitative techniques
• reflect the new understanding of public policies on industrial dynamics which is developed through the combination of evolutionary and systemic theories of innovation systems

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