India's National and Regional Innovation Systems: Challenges, Opportunities and Recommendations for Policy Makers

Abstract

There is a need for continuous reforms in India's infrastructure, innovation culture and dynamic leadership to sustain the growth of innovation. The purpose of this empirical study is to gain a better understanding of India's innovation systems. A comprehensive analysis has been done on two levels: on both a national level and a regional level. First, the section about the national level explores and explains the challenges and opportunities of India's innovation capacity using a semi-structured questionnaire of the practitioners. Second, the section about the regional level discusses the clusters formed within India through a mapping of industrial firms, educational/research institutions and innovation parks. Both an empirical activity framework and a functional-based conceptual framework have been presented to highlight the themes of “building-upgrading-promoting” and “democracy-culture-infrastructure”. Finally, this paper makes a theoretical contribution by providing a conceptual framework for studying India's innovation system and giving recommendations to policy makers about sustaining the innovation.