BIO:

Fandi Achmad is a DPhil candidate in International Development at Oriel College, University of Oxford. He has over ten years of work experience covering issues of international trade and digital trade policies, competition policy, and financial inclusion. He held various positions in the past, including in the Executive Office of the President of Indonesia, where he monitored the country’s strategic issues on industrial and trade policies, and in the ASEAN Secretariat, where he ran regional programmes for the development of competition policy and law and served the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) Working Group on competition negotiations between 2013-2016.
Fandi is currently a consultant for the St. Gallen Endowment for Prosperity Through Trade to monitor trade and commercial policy changes in ASEAN countries for the Global Trade Alert. He also recently engaged as a consultant for UNESCAP and OECD for a research project on digital trade regulatory restrictiveness in several Asian and African countries. Drawing from these experiences, his doctoral research seeks to investigate the channels on how digital trade affects digital technology diffusion in developing countries. He receives the Jardine Foundation Scholarship Award to sponsor his doctoral study.
Fandi holds a Bachelor in Economics Degree from Gadjah Mada University, Indonesia, a Master of Public Policy from the University of Michigan, USA, and a Master of Advanced Studies in Economics from KU Leuven, Belgium. He was also awarded as a Young Leaders for Indonesia by McKinsey & Co. in 2010

​

Speech Title: Digital Servitisation Exports and Manufacturing Innovation’s Pathways

Abstract: Manufacturers increasingly pair products with digitally delivered services for foreign customers, yet we know little about how these Digital Servitisation Exports (DSE) reshape firm foreign knowledge acquisition and innovation in developing economies. Using firm-level data on 19 Latin American countries’ manufacturers in 2006 and 2010, the study introduces a practical DSE measure and a Firm Digital Knowledge Acquisition Index (FDKAI) that captures routines and platforms for sourcing foreign knowledge through digital channels. To address selection, the study combines entropy balancing, logit models with country, industry, and year fixed effects, and Oster’s coefficient-stability bounds to estimate relationships between DSE innovation outcomes. Three takeaways emerge. First, DSE is associated with more innovation of both kinds: incremental improvements that refine existing offerings (exploitative innovation) and market-novel solutions that push the frontier (exploratory innovation). Second, the innovation payoffs from DSE arise not from digital exposure alone but from complementarities in knowledge conversion: firms convert foreign digital knowledge into innovation outcomes when FDKAI works in bundles with conversion capabilities such as R&D and structured employee training. Third, exploratory innovation demands a richer bundle than exploitative innovation, suggesting that stronger conversion capabilities are required to turn DSE-enabled incremental gains into market-novel breakthroughs. These findings show that DSE functions as an engineered knowledge system rather than merely a sales channel, highlighting the importance of institutionalising platform-mediated learning routines to unlock innovation gains from DSE in developing-country manufacturing firms.