10: The practitioners’ perspective on designing and governing innovation policy in a more complex and changing world (Carsten Dreher, Carsten Schwäbe, Matthias Weber, Kieron Flanagan)
Facing the normative turn in innovation policy (Daimer et al., 2012), new concepts of an agile, mission-oriented or transformative innovation policy emerged to enable policy making to govern the required transformations in a more complex and changing world (e.g., Borrás and Edquist, 2019; Haddad et al., 2022; Mazzucato, 2018; Weber et al., 2021). The major challenge of these concepts lies in the operationalisation to a practitioners’ perspective such that relevance and practicability of policy recommendations are guaranteed (e.g., Haddad et al., 2022; Kanger et al., 2020) (e.g., Haddad et al., 2022, Kanger et al., 2021). Often, policy recommendations from innovation studies based on TIS, MLP or other evolutionary concepts have a lack of practical relevance and of a clear connection to the normative objectives of instruments (Schmidt, 2018). A growing literature on innovation policy studies addresses these issues, but there is still a lack of conceptual contributions to operationalise the following dimensions of design and governance practices: How can missions and goals of innovation policy be translated to addressable objectives of instruments? How can a systematic overview on possible innovation policy instruments look like? What innovation policy design features have a strong practical relevance to be discussed and which do not? How can interfaces to other instruments be designed to guarantee coherent policy mixes (e.g. for coordinating direct R&D project funding with market formation instruments or innovation with exnovation processes)? What kind of capabilities and interactions between policy actors for decision-making and implementation of instruments are necessary prerequisites for the success of a specific instrument design? What kind of agile design features and governance processes exist to organise knowledge exchange between innovation systems and policy actors as well as among policy actors to enable learning and policy adaption processes? We invite interdisciplinary conceptual and empirical contributions to the analysis of innovation policy from a more practical viewpoint. Moreover, we invite international perspectives from different countries to discuss common challenges of instrument design and implementation.
Keywords: instrument selection and design, governance of innovation policy, policy learning, agility, innovation policy system, policy practioners