This paper proposes a generic framework for analyzing innovation systems,
anchored around five fundamental activities - R&D, implementation, end-use,
education, linkage - and focused on the performance implications of a
system's structure and dynamics. Rather than simply describing the role and
performance of particular actors, institutions and policies, this approach
focuses on system-level characteristics, including the distribution of
these activities within the system, the organizational boundaries around
them, coordination mechanisms, evolutionary processes, and the
effectiveness of the system in introducing, diffusing and exploiting
technological innovations. The framework is applied to a comparison of
China's national innovation system under central planning and since
reforms, revealing the evolving structure and dynamics of this system and
current inconsistencies and perverse incentives that policymakers must
address to realize their development goals. More generally, it provides a
basis for addressing the implicit assumptions of organizational types,
roles and convergence among innovation systems emerging in very different
contexts, whether national, regional or industrial.