Inventor motivation insight in the developing country: it's not desire, but effort to invent

摘要

Although inventions have long been recognised as a vital tool for increasing productivity and economic growth, there have been a few studies on inventor motivation in the literature. In most developing economies (e.g. Vietnam), inventors have been considered as a unlimited national resource but largely underutilised. The goal of this study is to clarify which factors motivate the inventors to invent in a new context of a developing economy like Vietnam. Based on the self-determination theory and the motivated information processing theory, this study seems to be the first examining the relationship between those factors denoted by desires and inventor motivation measured by effort in this context. The dataset derived from a sample of Vietnamese inventors was analysed by the structural equation modelling to quantify reasons for motivating inventors. Results of the analysis provide preliminary evidence pertaining to some policy implications for other developing economies with similarities to Vietnam.