DYNAMICS OF INDUSTRY AND INNOVATION: ORGANIZATIONS, NETWORKS AND SYSTEMS

South Africa has invested the better part of the last ten years on defining the kind of national system of innovation (NSI) it wants to create, rather than on how it might get there. This is slowly changing. The paper outlines how the contribution of human resources to the NSI might be better understood and how information about human capital might be operationalised for policy purposes. It reviews endeavours to this effect undertaken by OECD countries and concludes that a more idiosyncratic version is required for the latecomer country context. It then describes the largely symbolic mandate behind NSI policy since the mid-1990s. It surveys existing human resource databases and analyses the extent to which they speak to policy themes that emanate from the aims and objectives of the NSI, whether they can be used to verify if targets are reached, and what coverage they give to input into and performance of the system. Finally, it interprets the results of this inventory in terms of