In 2011 the World Bank in collaboration with the Department for International Development (DFID), launched the follow-up survey to the standard World Bank Enterprise Survey (ES) aiming to improve the measurement of innovation in emerging economies and developing countries.
Researchers revisited businesses already interviewed during the ES to collect firm-level data on innovation and innovation related activities, such as product innovation, process innovation, organizational innovation, and marketing innovation.
The objectives of the Innovation Follow-up Survey are:
- to provide evidence on nature, role and determinants of innovation in emerging and developing countries;
- to generate information that will be used to identify projects and develop policies to promote innovation;
- to stimulate systematic policy dialogue on the importance of innovation as a driver of private sector development and economic growth at the global level.
In Malawi, the survey was administered to a subset of ES respondents randomly selected in order to have a final sample of 75% of the original ES; 250 successful interviews were conducted. Business owners and top managers were interviewed from June 2014 through February 2015.
The innovation dataset can be merged with Malawi 2014 Enterprise Survey dataset using the common id variable "idstd".