Jörg Meyer-Stamer

Jörg Meyer-Stamer was a German political scientist and economic development practitioner.

He also wrote several papers on structural change, technology, innovation and industrial policy.

He was born as Jörg Meyer, but he changed his surname to Meyer-Stamer during his early adulthood.

He completed a master's degree (Diplom-Politologue) in Political Science at the University of Hamburg between 1979 and 1986.

He completed a doctoral degree in 1995 at the University of Hamburg, Faculty of Social Sciences.

During this time he became a visiting fellow at the Institute of Latin American Research in Hamburg.

In 1988 he joined the German Development Institute/Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE/GDI) in Berlin as a fellow.

He worked on industrial competitiveness, technological change, and private sector development.

During this time he co-developed the framework of Systemic Competitiveness with Klaus Esser, Wolfgang Hillebrand and Dirk Messner.

During his last two years at the DIE/GDI (1997 to 1998), Jörg was appointed as the head of teaching at the GDI/DIE with overall topical and organizational responsibility of the postgraduate course.

[3] He led a project to assess and evaluate the overall performance of structural policy in North Rhine-Westphalia.

During this time, he represented Germany on the United Nations Commission on Science and Technology for Development.

He worked on a project with the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex on the impact of global value chains on local clusters.

But Jörg felt constrained by the demands of the academic and research world, and in 2001 he ventured out as a freelance consultant.

Together with Klaus Esser, Wolfgang Hillebrand, and Dirk Messner, Jörg Meyer-Stamer developed the concept of "systemic competitiveness".

The DIE-GDI described the concept of systemic competitiveness as having a key impact on the discussion, both in Germany and internationally, on strategies suited to integrating developing countries into the world economy.

He also suggested that a light touch approach focused on quick win activities is more suitable to start a local economic development process, and once the process is more mature and established a more planning driven approach involving more project management could be introduced.

Jörg developed the Participatory Appraisal of Competitive Advantage (PACA) methodology.

The PACA methodology has been used in more than 30 countries including South Africa, Sri Lanka, Namibia, Ghana, Argentina, Vietnam, Indonesia and Thailand.

He combined insights from the study of technological capability, the emerging field of innovation systems with his experience in local economic development.

In 2005 Jörg co-authored a working paper with Christian Schoen that formalised the methodology.

Jörg Meyer-Stamer, Technology, Competitiveness and Radical Policy Change: The Case of Brazil (London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass, in association with the German Development Institute, 1997), pp. 336.

Path dependence in regional development: persistence and change in three industrial clusters in Santa Catarina, Brazil.