Learning from the Bangalore Experience: The Role of Universities in an Emerging Regional Innovation System

This paper is concerned with the role of universities and public research organizations initiating and sustaining the development of regional innovation systems in developing countries, focusing the discussion on the Bangalore software cluster. Innovation systems research has paid significant attention to the importance of universities and other publicly financed research institutions as engines of growth and innovative performance in regions. With noble exceptions these papers tend to ignore the specific context in which this interaction between the university and the industry takes place, that is, the specific competences and capabilities of the universities and the firms’ specific needs, particularly in developing countries. This papers aims at reducing this gap by making an empirically-based analysis of the role that universities can play in initiating, sustaining and deepening Bangalore’s regional innovation system for the IT-service and software industry embedding the discussion on the specificities of the strategies of the firms and the universities located in the cluster.