| dc.description.abstract | This paper addresses an important topic which is the national policy for innovation and technology in Egypt. In this regard, the paper tries to answer the important question of whether Egypt has a national innovation and technology policy. This question is raised within the framework of the country’s vision regarding sustainable development, which was elaborated in Egypt’s Vision 2030 and detailed in strategic programs, the most important of which are the National Program for Structural Reforms and the Program for Deepening Domestic Industrialization. This is only natural since any national innovation and technology policy of a specific country aims primarily to achieve economic growth and sustainable development within the framework of this country’s vision and national strategy.
The importance of the paper’s topic lies in the fact that innovation has become the name of the game for sustainable development in the current era, which is witnessing the transformation of the economies of most of the developed world and many developing countries into knowledge economies based on innovation, where innovation is simply defined as the transformation of science, and technology into an economic and developmental value. Indeed, we live today in the era of the knowledge revolution as opposed to the industrial revolution that the world experienced more than a hundred years ago.
The paper concluded that Egypt does not have a national policy for innovation and technology, although the issue of innovation and technology policy is on the agenda of most productive sectors in Egypt. The paper monitors and analyses different sectoral policies, whether those policies were written and documented or implicit and embedded in practices within these sectors. The paper also discusses some practices and policies, especially those related to the program of deepening of domestic industrialization and localization of industry, with the aim of correcting some concepts and rectifying the course of the industrialization process. The latter is currently focusing on the manufacturing processes of the final product and on maximizing its local material content, while the purpose of deepening industrialization is- in addition to that element - the transformation of the economy into an industrial economy based on science and technology and developing its own manufacturing technologies and product designs.
The paper emphasized the importance of developing a comprehensive national policy for innovation and technology to realize the country’s vision and strategic programs, as sectoral policies (if they exist) remain deficient and ineffective because the innovation process in any sector requires concerted efforts and capabilities of all other sectors. In the end, the paper presents some recommendations and proposals that can be adopted when developing a comprehensive national policy for innovation and technology. The most important of these recommendations relates to the governance of the innovation process and the design of national innovation and technology policies, which must be carried out by a higher council for innovation and technology that derives its powers from the head of the executive authority so that this council becomes able to coordinate the various sectoral policies and ensure their implementation | en |
