International Conference on Innovation for Inclusive Growth

Date: 10-12 February 2015

Venue: Taj Palace Hotel, New Delhi, India

How to participate | Agenda | Partner events | Background

The OECD, jointly with the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), will host the Conference on Innovation for Inclusive Growth, which will gather over 200 international and Indian participants, including government representatives, private sector corporations, international organisations and high-level experts. It is designed as a forum fostering high-level discussion and policy exchange among the stakeholders concerned with the question of how innovation can best serve inclusive development. The conference is organised as part of a series of events to be organised on subsequent days by the World Bank and UNU-MERIT.

The objective is to foster discussion and policy exchange among the variety of stakeholders drawn from a variety of developed, emerging and developing economies who are addressing the question of how innovation can best serve inclusive development. The conference will be structured aroundcentral policy questions regarding inclusive innovation; each will be discussed as part of a dedicated session by panels of high-level policy representatives. By bringing together leading experts including government representatives, private sector corporations, international organisations and high-level experts from advanced, emerging and developing economies, it aims to further multidimensional understanding of the issues at hand and provide basis for concrete action.

‌‌‌

International Conference on Innovation for Inclusive Growth, India, 10-12 February 2015

Preliminary Agenda Download as PDF

Background

Innovation is a critical driver of growth and a motor for generating employment: this is a key lesson of the past decades. Despite the significant contributions of growth to the reduction of poverty during the past decades, high levels of inequalities persist or are even rising in some developed and emerging economies. As a consequence, achieving inclusive development is at the top of many governments' agendas. It is therefore crucial to examine the possible contributions of innovation to inclusive development.

Innovation can contribute to inclusiveness, not only as a driver of income growth but also through innovations that are specifically aimed at lower-income and excluded groups ("inclusive innovations"), which can substantially improve their welfare. Inclusive innovations include innovative goods and services, often substitutes for missing public goods (e.g. health services or access to electricity). To respond to the specific needs of excluded groups and adapt to their requirements (including adaptation to deficient infrastructures), technical as well as business model innovations are needed. Inclusive innovations are often for-profit or at least cost-covering initiatives, and as such offer a more sustainable alternative to support development than those based on continual public or philanthropic funding. As a result, there is a growing interest in fostering the development of these initiatives through policy action, especially as a major challenge that inclusive innovations face is how to reach scale.

Innovation dynamics and innovation policies affect inclusiveness from different angles:First, innovation can increase inequalities in income and opportunities of different groups in society ("social inclusiveness"). Second, innovation dynamics have impacts on "industrial inclusiveness": Many economies have economic structures characterised by concentration of innovation activities where selected frontier innovators co-exist with a group of weak performers. Third, innovation and its policies also affect "territorial inclusiveness": the geographic dimensions of industrial and social inequalities.

The OECD "Innovation for Inclusive Growth" project analyses the impacts of innovation and related policies on inclusive growth. Addressing the needs of policymakers in both key non-member economies and OECD countries, the aims of the project are to:

Provide evidence on the effects of innovation and related policies on inclusive growth focusing on industrial, social and territorial inequalities; and
Develop concrete policy solutions to support countries in reconciling their innovation and inclusive development agendas, including options for scaling up inclusive innovations.

The project is undertaken under the auspices of the OECD Committee for Scientific and Technological Policy (CSTP). It mobilises OECD competences in innovation, education, and regional development and contributes to the OECD's Inclusive Growth Initiative. This transversal initiative aims to deliver a renewed strategic policy agenda by identifying how to define and measure the concept of inclusive growth and shedding light on the policy options and trade-offs to promote growth and inclusiveness. More information can be found here:

OECD Innovation for Inclusive Growth project: http://oe.cd/inclusive

OECD Inclusive Growth Initiative:http://www.oecd.org/inclusive-growth/.

www.oecd.org/sti/inno/innovation-for-inclusive-growth-conference.htm