Communications Development announces publication of Industrial Development Report 2002/2003: Competing through Innovation and Learning

Summer 2002
Communications Development announces the publication of the United Nations Industrial Development Organization's Industrial Development Report 2002/2003: Competing through Innovation and Learning. Communications Development worked closely with UNIDO to plan, write, edit, design, and produce this high-profile report.

The first in a series, the report's main theme is the indispensable role of innovation and learning in narrowing the industrial capability gap between countries.

The report assesses the diversity and divergence of industrial development around the world, finding that a few developing countries have done very well in the fast-changing industrial scene, while a disturbingly large number have not.

The report introduces the UNIDO Industrial Development Scoreboard, which provides information on crucial aspects of countries' industrial development and competitiveness. The Scoreboard includes an index of a country's ability to produce and export manufactures, and benchmarks of the structural drivers of industrial performance. The Scoreboard reveals wide dispersion in the levels of industrial development and pronounced differences in structural factors.

The report demonstrates that building competitive industrial capabilities is a long, costly, and risky learning process, which many developing countries cannot afford to accomplish entirely on their own. In today's global setting, external sources can be used to promote industrialization, but building domestic industrial capabilities is a must for industrial growth to be rewarding and sustainable.

The report contends that enterprises can upgrade their technological capabilities if they link with foreign partners to acquire technologies and skills. They have to leverage the relationships with those outsiders to squeeze as much as possible from them. And they have to learn to use and adapt the product and process technologies they acquire. In other words, enterprises have to innovate and learn in a broad sense.

The report also documents how participation in global value chains can accelerate the process of innovation and learning by enterprises and their clusters—and especially in knowledge-intensive sectors.

Developing countries have primary responsibility for ensuring conditions conducive to productivity-enhancing industrialization. But the international community also has a clear responsibility to assist them in addressing the growing structural gaps—to ensure that countries are not denied the dynamics of industrial development.