The concept of national innovation systems (NIS) involves consideration of the economic arrangements of individual countries. It is necessary to identify the features of institutions’ evolution that contribute to the processes of creating and transforming knowledge into new technologies and products. The article examines the experience of developing the NIS of the USA, the United Kingdom, China and Iran. The US and the UK have stable and developed NIS with a long history. Thus, Iran and China can be classified as countries with developing innovation systems but demonstrating considerable success. The significant difference between the considered innovation systems is how countries achieve political and economic sustainability. All of them are trying to stimulate market mechanisms for creating innovations. The Chinese innovation model combines the promotion of grassroots innovation and government support for technology enterprises. In the US and the UK, the leading role of business is associated with the perception that it is better at distributing investment in R&D than the Government. Iran is also trying to stimulate private innovation, but the Government still plays the key role because of the limited domestic market and sanctions restrictions. One of the prerequisites for the development of the NIS of Iran and China is a long-term policy in higher education, which, combined with population growth, has led to a significant expansion of access to higher education. The article is of interest to the Russian scientific community since the authors, on the one hand, explore the NIS of the leading countries in the field of innovation located on different continents (the UK, the US and China) and, on the other hand, a country that has been under sanctions pressure (Iran), which is especially important in the current economic and political realities. The authors suggest thinking about possible ways of developing the Russian innovation system by analyzing the foreign experience of the NIS. Scientists who are involved in researching NIS and national innovation policymakers can use the results of this scientific work
Keywords
institutions, evolution, china, national innovation system, China, United States, United Kingdom, Iran