Innovation policies and sector development in Nigeria's oil palm industry: lessons from Malaysia

Increasingly developing countries are beginning to employ a set of instruments to promote industrialisation that are collectively termed innovation policy. This paper presents the qualitative outcomes of the differential uses of innovation policies to foster firms' innovation and production performance in the oil palm industry in Nigeria and Malaysia. The primary and secondary data used were gathered over a period of two years. The outcomes are different because the efforts and commitments to the policies were different over time. We show that the challenges of industrialisation constitute an evolutionary challenge that requires continuous and explicit effort. Employing a wide variety of factors; Malaysia demonstrate that countries can exploit low-tech traditional agricultural technologies such as oil palm for wealth creation by using a combination of policy instruments and incentives mechanisms to drive the sector whilst the lack of targeted policies might have contributed to the sub-optimal performance of the sector in Nigeria.