The scaling up of DUI mode, with proposals for national DUI policies in developing countries, based on institutional analysis of the national innovation system

Although national innovation systems (NIS) have been studied for more than thirty years in both developed and developing countries, doing-using-interacting (DUI) policies remain largely absent from the innovation agendas of developing economies. The literature on NIS is not new, and it has already incorporated the DUI mode into the framework of the learning economy. Yet, existing research on DUI has offered little guidance for national-scale innovation policy in developing countries, as DUI has been analyzed primarily at the micro and mesoeconomic levels. Consequently, recent studies have concentrated on firm-level performance and the role of STI and/or DUI modes within regional innovation systems in advanced economies. Our conceptual contribution revisits the NIS literature and scales up the DUI mode by adopting an institutional and macroeconomic perspective tailored to developing contexts. On this basis, we identify three types of DUI policies, ranging from the least to the most transformative at the societal level: (i) a basic policy linking education, training and labor markets to create learning opportunities; (ii) an intermediate policy fostering collaboration between formal and informal actors through interactive learning spaces; and (iii) an inclusive, transformative policy embedding the DUI mode within a societal learning culture.