ICTlogy

Abstract:

Innovation policymakers today control huge budgets and are tasked with tackling challenges as important as the current climate crisis and supporting the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Having a deep understanding of their world is essential if governments are to support policymakers effectively in executing their role.

Through the Global Innovation Policy Accelerator programme, we seek to have a deep understanding of the world of innovation policymakers, their context, needs, challenges, and activities, so that we can help them develop innovation policies that match society’s ambitions.

We have been working with policymakers across Latin America, India, South East Asia and Brazil, with Egypt, Kenya, Jordan, Turkey and South Africa recently joining our network. Through our work, we’ve learned a lot about the innovation policy systems in these countries and we’ll be publishing country reports about all of them. Read our previous reports on India, Indonesia, the Philippines and Malaysia.

In these reports, we highlight what we’ve learned about the challenges and priorities of innovation policymakers working in these systems.

Here, we provide a summary of a more detailed report on Vietnam that you can download in full as a pdf (above). It is the culmination of many conversations and interviews with different policymakers in the Vietnamese innovation system, across government departments.

This article has quotes from those conversations that we have kept anonymous. We would like to thank everyone who contributed to the insights that follow. Note that the original review and research was undertaken in 2018, and many facts and figures date from that point. We consider the main findings to still be relevant in understanding and interpreting the Vietnamese science, technology and innovation system.