Issues of scientific and technological development (S&TI) have been attracting the attention of researchers and policy-makers to a lesser extent in North African countries (Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Libya, Mauritania and Egypt) for several decades. However, the question of innovation, which entered the development agenda in the early 2000s, seems to have become a real preoccupation of policy-makers during and researchers in the last decade in particular, and numerous political resolutions and institutional reforms have been. Yet reality shows that this has not translated into a truly effective innovation dynamic, as shown by the scores and different rankings of most innovation indicators for countries in the sub-region. As our previous work has shown, they are faced with the problem of the difficult "emergence of their innovation systems". 

Their National Innovation Systems (NIS) have undergone long periods of construction, and their mode of emergence seems to follow a different path and trajectory from those of advanced countries. In other words, they need more appropriate Emerging Innovation Policies (EIPs) to effectively drive innovation systems that can boost growth and employment, and lift the region's economies out of the middle-income trap. This has prompted researchers from North Africa to South Africa to focus on examining these modes of emergence of innovation dynamics, rather than on the application of classic NIS tools and theories, often constructed a posteriori.

It is against this backdrop of a complex emergence phase that the new paradigm of "transformative innovation" is taking its place, both as a new concept of an academic nature and as a basis for new innovation development policies. Transformative innovation policies (TIPs), as discussed by researchers in various parts of the world, are gradually becoming part of the landscape of innovation research for development. Transformative innovation will therefore have to respond simultaneously to two needs: the need for growth and development (driven in particular by a flourishing industrial sector) through the acceleration of the emergence phase, and secondly to the problems of climate change and inequalities in the economies of North Africa, which undermine any progress in the direction of technological mastery and innovation, and which the 20230 Agenda for the SDGs imposes.

This special issue is the partial result of the panel that was organized at the 5th Africalics network conference in Douala, Cameroon, in November 2023;

The aim of this special issue is to provide some reflections and empirical evidence on some of the questions raised above, by examining different sectors. Some topics are linked to the issue of emergence, while others are more in line with transformative innovation dynamics. In the first category, Younes Ferdj and Meriem Amghra examine the role of the mechanical engineering sector in Algerian industrial development. Long-term trends show a situation where purely technological consumption is locked in, and where very low production levels make it difficult for innovation capacities to emerge. In the same vein, Tin El-Kadi Ihssen and Abdelkader Djeflat analyze the international STI partnership with China in the digital sector. This South-South partnership raises new hopes for accelerating the emergence of high-performance innovation systems in the region. However, questions remain as to whether the China-Africa partnership in general is really capable of driving innovation for development.

In the second category, we have three contributions: the first by Fatiha Beddek on the issue of eco-innovation and its determinants: using Algeria's energy transition as a case study, she analyzes the determinants of environmental innovation with a view to achieving the SDGs. Nadia Rebib's second contribution, on the development of artificial intelligence in a context of optimizing resource use, addresses the issue of sustainable development while accelerating growth. The third, by Gregory Mvogo, covers some interesting aspects of an inclusive innovation, that of mobile money in Cameroon, its introduction and successful appropriation having, in a relatively short space of time, transformed traditional activities into income-generating ones. Even more interestingly, mobile money helps to cope with climatic shocks, particularly during the rainy season, especially in semi-urban and rural areas where transaction costs are still high.