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The challenge of Latin regions
Latin regions face today the great challenge of incentivizing innovation processes and fostering high value-added economic activities in order to enhance the living standards of its population. Regions with an economic base relying mostly in extractive activities, basic manufacturing or low value-added services have found great difficulties in maintaining its competitiveness and ensuring growing levels of economic development and prosperity. Likewise, economic development strategies based in the simply attraction of foreign direct investment andmultinational companies have demonstrated insufficient in triggering endogenous innovation processes.
But transitioning towards an innovation-based development model requires interactions and processes among several regional and global actors that do not take place spontaneously. On the one hand, it requires articulating the talent, knowledge, and technological resources found in regional universities and research centers with industry’s productive and commercial capabilities. On the other, it requires an entrepreneurial culture and a global vision to link regional technological and productive resources and capabilities with the opportunities in global markets. However, existing organizational structures and incentive systems not always foster the collective learning and capability building processes required to transform knowledge and technology into value.
Supporting the efforts of regional leaders through local synergies and global partnerships
LatIPnet’s Regions of Innovation program is designed to support the efforts of regional leaders that seek to promote an innovation-based development model. This program promotes local synergies and global partnerships that trigger the generation of value out of the leading-edge knowledge, the talent and the technological resources of a region. This program works closely with the main actors in a region – government agencies, universities, research centers, non-profit organizations, entrepreneurs and businesses – in order to identify new opportunities, define common goals and channel resources to strengthen the regional system of innovation. LatIPnet also promotes partnerships with global companies and leading research institutions from around the world in order to complement the resources found in the region and to leverage its innovation capabilities in global markets.
The Regions of Innovation program is structured around three stages with duration of five years. During this time, LatIPnet establishes the local supporting structures and processes as well as the global partnerships that allow a region to trigger and sustain an innovation and value-generation process.
Learn how LatIPnet is working in the State of Guanajuato in Mexico to create value out of its knolwedge and technological resources.
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