I am genuinely interested how such a thing would be done. I understand that it wouldn’t be as hard as with communism, but I can’t think of any way to encourage companies to make better (genuinely better) products. I remember how my mother told me how in her days (she lived in the DDR) there wasn’t really any reason to be better than another company, as they would all be payed equally.
Has that been a common occurrence in socialism?
I wish I knew. I have never in a country like Vietnam or Cuba, and I have little knowledge about how people live in these countries. Although these few countries that are genuinely socialist/communist are heavily sanctioned by the US and forbidden from participating in trade with neighboring countries (I have heard this referred to as “economic warfare”). Without access to international trade, these countries tend to be extremely poor in natural resources, which leads to tremendous scarcity, and makes life very difficult to live. Naturally, this would be a hindrance to innovation.
So personally I don’t know if the difficulties of living life in a communist country is a result of the problems inherent to communism. I strongly suspect the the problems are all caused by economic warfare, but I personally have no evidence to say one way or the other.
That said, Cuba did develop their own COVID vaccine completely on their own at the height of the crisis, so that could be a bit of evidence in favor of innovation under socialism, which if it is, would be amazing given that they could be so innovative even while being the victims of economic warfare.