Aggiornamento del Sistema Nazionale dell’Innovazione in Cambogia: Analisi dell'Innovazione a Livello di Impresa, Settoriale e Nazionale

Cambodia’s NIS is functioning as an emergent innovation system. The business environment has been improved in general but is still not conducive to national innovation performance. The constraints in human capital, access to finance, and high trade costs can explain why Cambodia has a low level of R&D (at only 10% of sample firms). Another possible reason is the lack of complementary factors, such as internationally-recognized certification, foreign technology license, and new capital, which make domestic firms earn a lower return on their R&D. Cambodian firms apply only basic management and organizational capabilities. There are two explanations. First, firms interact with other firms or public institutions to learn technological innovation, product and process innovations. However, Cambodian firms apply technological cooperation to produce only process innovation, which means that they have limited management capabilities so that they do not intend to interact to develop product innovation. Second, the predicted value of R&D investment has a positive impact on a firm's propensity to produce all types of innovation outcomes, but only the predicted value of product innovation has a positively significant but small impact on labor productivity, suggesting the limited management capabilities among Cambodian firms. These limited management capabilities can be the reason why the interaction between firms and between firms and other firms or public institutions is still low. International integration of Cambodian firms into international markets and global value chains is limited since international trade obstacle is likely to decrease R&D investment. Furthermore, Cambodia faces high exporting costs, limited national qualification infrastructure, and burdensome business regulations in addition to the lack of R&D activities and management capabilities stated above, resulting in the limited number of medium-sized exporters in the Cambodian export structure and a small number of startups and tech SMEs. These problems also explain why linkages between multinational firms and the domestic economy are still weak. Cambodia has an incipient science and technology system to support domestic firms’ organizational and technological capabilities, impeding the industrial transformation. It has four growing high-tech industries, 16 emerging high-tech industries, 11 marginal high-tech industries, and 23 losing high-tech industries. Also, it has 11 growing low-tech industries, 12 emerging low-tech industries, 73 marginal industries, and 11 losing low-tech sectors. Cambodia has no sector moving from a quadrant with trade advantage to a quadrant with both trade and technological advantages. This pattern is different from that of the East Asian countries, which commonly developed their electronics industries by gaining from trade advantage before they develop further into both trade and technological advantages. There is also no industry moving from the quadrant with technology advantage to quadrant with trade advantage and to quadrant with both advantages, representing the technology push. This implication suggests that Cambodia has not committed to developing the technological infrastructure to support the domestic firms in upgrading their organizational and technological capabilities. However, two high-tech industries, including Motorcycles and bicycles and Equipment for distributing electricity, move from the quadrant without trade and technological advantages to the quadrant with both of them. Cambodia also has 14 high-tech industries moving from the quadrant without both advantages to the quadrant with trade advantage. It seems that Cambodia can achieve the initial success in these high-tech industries through learning by doing related to the linkage between multinational firms and domestic firms to improve trade specialization.