Research and Development and Innovation: What Role for Design and Engineering in African Economic Development

Abstract

While building innovation capabilities is now clearly understood as a key element in the inclusive growth and sustainable development. Amongst the components of innovation dynamics, the issue of design Engineering (D&E) is drawing more and more attention by international organization and a growing corpus of researchers both in the North and in the South. Yet, D&E raise various questions related to the concepts, the tools and the instruments it uses, to the links with R&D and innovation capabilities and finally, to the practices of D&E and the interactive learning at the enterprise level. This article raises the question: what is the state of development of D&E in Africa and Algeria in particular at firm level? To do that a field work involving twenty Algerian firms were surveyed. The findings show that D&E is largely neglected function at firm level as a result of lack of awareness, lack of implication of experienced workers and low practice of reverse engineering.