Adopt AND innovate: How Brazil and Taiwan did both

How can developing countries catch up with the technology frontier? The standard debate frames it as a choice between adopting technology from abroad and innovating at home. Karthik Tadepalli argues that this dichotomy is false – and that two of the twentieth century's most striking development stories show why.

In this episode of Ideas in Development, Karthik takes us from Taiwan's Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI), which licensed chip technology in the 1970s and went on to spin out UMC and TSMC, to Brazil's Embrapa, which unlocked an area three times the size of Texas for farming and helped to turn a food-importing country into the world's largest agricultural exporter.

We discuss why human capital came before results in both stories, how the spin-off model worked at ITRI, the concept of ‘induced innovation’ that shaped Embrapa's research priorities, and why surviving the politics mattered as much as getting the science right.

Karthik's articles on Taiwan (in the Asterisk magazine) and Brazil (on his Substack) are both linked in the show notes on our Substack: https://ideasindevelopment.substack.com/