Tracing ICT Innovation Ecosystem of Pakistan

  • M. Nadeem Jahangir
  • Asif Ali Shah

Abstract

Innovation Ecosystem plays a pivotal role in facilitating activities that transform ideas into products, processes and services. It is a complex set of environment comprises of various public/private-sector entities whose activities and interactions promote creation of new technologies. Globally, it has become a part of developed and developing nations’ priority to have National Innovation Systems (NISs) to encourage such ecosystem as it contributes towards economic development. In Pakistan, same approach has been adopted describing innovation as key driving force for all sectors of economy in recently announced National Science, Technology & Innovation Policy 2012 (NSTIP 2012). In which sixteen key thrust areas have also been highlighted in which Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) sector is one of them which has been chosen for this investigation. In this research, mapping of Innovation Ecosystem of ICT sector of Pakistan has been performed by identifying presence of various stakeholders and their possible interactions. A mapping concept of Osama, A. et al (2015) has been used for providing detailed visual description of ICT sector that would be helpful for policy makers and other public sector administrative bodies in their decision making at the governance level. The mapping reveals that about six categories of organizations are operating within the ICT ecosystem; which are focusing towards producing IT workforce and IT startups. Further, emerging trend of community based science NGOs/NPOs is also been found which sponsor and promote creation of Startups. Academia, whereas changing its role from research creation to research commercialization. Finally, a pattern of Quadruple Helix Model has also been observed in the ICT ecosystem in Pakistan which deserves to be further investigated in future studies

Published
2016-12-05