Intelligent National Innovation System for Regional Development in Egypt: A Proposed Conceptual Model

IntroductionInnovation is a multi-player-multi-activity work that needs concentrated and well-functioning network association, communication and harmonization among the innovation ecosystem entities. The establishment of an advanced dynamic knowledge society is an essential goal for Egypt by commercialization of the academic research through industrial sectors. During the period of 1985 to 2005, many long-term innovation policies and initiatives were created by the Egyptian governments and several ministries created some innovation policies, players and bonds. As a result of the importance of these innovation policies and activities to renew Egypt, they have been evaluated by the European Trend Chart on Innovation. According to this evaluation, these innovation activities are obvious but incomplete strategy, (OECD, 2010). On the other hand, the Egyptian authorities have a clear understanding of the need for advanced stages to deal with the systemic nature of innovation and to utilize resources in different ministries in a rational and coherent method to find practical solutions for the social problems. The Egyptian innovation ecosystem components (e.g. Industry, Academia and other stakeholders) are not capable enough to produce technologies or products to satisfy their specific needs. Of course, there are some successful trials, but the majority of the innovative ideas to generate products / service must be imported from abroad either by foreign partners or local agents. Then, these ideas have to be commercialized by local producer throughout a well-established technology market, (Hahn and Kocker , 2008). However, Egypt has an enormous science inheritance and huge numbers of researchers to depend on them. Unluckily, the Egyptian scientific and innovation ecosystem has faced a lot of obstacles that prevent it from doing its potential part in the knowledge-based-economy. The existing transformation of Egyptian society is a golden opportunity to mitigate long years of poor financial aid, shortage of effective strategic innovation management, huge spiral bureaucratic system,- lack of managerial practices and ignorance of the potentiality of scientific applications in modernizing the Egyptian economy, (Bond, Maram, & Soliman, 2013). The Egyptian global innovation index ranking has deteriorated during the last ten years. The following table shows a global innovation index ranking comparison analysis between selected Middle East countries that have some sort of similarities in the socio-cultural aspects but for sure, they have totally different approaches in utilizing innovation strategies for the national and regional economic development.The Egyptian innovation ecosystem has experienced a lot of problems such as: 1) there is no centralized long-term innovation strategy to produce national science, technology and innovation; 2) Many of the ecosystem entities are still in the stage of creating their full collection of capabilities and responsibilities. A small number of centers have still not finished procedures required for contracting all the resources to comprehend full operational capacity, (Bond, Maram, & Soliman, 2013). On the other hand, many entities have made significant success for being nationally known innovation players (e.g. Smart Village). 3) Despite most of these entities represent essential instruments for structuring and applying innovation support policies and programs, they are working in isolated islands and there is no national network that union all of these activities to the development of the society, (Bond, Maram, & Soliman, 2013). Essential innovation entities such as chambers of trading, universities, research institutes, vocational training centers, financial support organizations and business and technology hubs are in place to support the Egyptian industry. Unfortunately from an innovation side, they have dissimilar strengths and weaknesses, and till now, most of them are not completely utilized or connected. …