INNOVATION POLICIES IN EUROPE AND THE US
The Authors would like to thank the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science and the Arts for their generous support.
Innovation Policies in Europe and the US
The new agenda
Edited by
PETERS. BIEGELBAUER
Institute for Advanced Studies, Vienna, Austria
SUSANA BORRS
Roskilde University, Denmark
First published 2003 by Ashgate Publishing
Reissued 2018 by Routledge
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Copyright Peter S. Biegelbauer and Susana Borrs 2003
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A Library of Congress record exists under LC control number: 2002110615
ISBN 13: 978-1-138-71789-3 (hbk)
ISBN 13: 978-1-315-19590-2 (ebk)
Contents
Margaret Sharp
Henry Etzkowitz
Dominique Foray
Tarmo Lemola
Jesper Lindgaard Christensen
Marianne van der Steen
Jennifer Cassingena Harper
Kurt Mayer
Peter S. Biegelbauer
Franc Mali
Fiorenza Belussi
Jakob Edler
This book raises both general and specific questions of great interest both for scholars interested in public policy and policy makers. What role do new ideas and new theoretical developments play when it comes to shaping changes in policy? Do such changes take place abruptly and radically, or are they rather processes of incremental policy learning? Do they evolve differently in different national contexts or do the similarities dominate when national trajectories are compared?
The contributions to this book analyze how a general tendency, the transformation of technology policy into innovation policy, is reflected differently in different countries. It points to the importance of new theoretical developments such as evolutionary economics and innovation studies as well as to the role of international organizations such as the OECD and the European Commission in diffusing these ideas.
The case studies show that while the direction of change is similar in the different countries, the degree and the form of change are very different. Among the countries studied the clearest change has taken place in the Netherlands and Finland while Austria and the UK seem to be lagging far behind in terms of adjusting to the new policy paradigm.
The analysis brings a new, important, input into the process of international policy learning and its characterization of innovation policy as constituted by the promotion of policy co-ordination, learning and knowledge appropriation, functional flexibility and organizational change is very much to the point. These are three new policy areas where new initiatives meet administrative and political resistance as well as transcending the old theoretical market-failure logic.
In international organizations as in national administrations, the dividing lines between directorates or ministries have become barriers to policy integration and hamper the process of innovation. One striking example is labor market policy that has become very much focused on the market mechanisms for buying and selling labor while neglecting how labor market institutions affect life-long learning processes which are critical to the long term innovative capability of national systems.
Labor markets and labor contracts are among the most important factors for innovation, but for reasons of tradition they are not integrated in efforts to promote innovation.
Learning and knowledge appropriation are not easily integrated into main-stream economics. When they appear, they do so in the misleading sense that they refer to the diffusion of information that is the only form of knowledge that can be handled in neo-classical economics. While the distribution of information may be seen as a mainly technical problem, the same is not true for learning competences and skills. Here human interaction, trust, and social capital appear as crucial prerequisites for effective learning. This is why innovation policy needs to take into account the social dimension both as something that conditions policy outcomes and as something that is affected by innovation policy. One of the major problems with policies that speed up innovation is that, if not thoughtfully designed, they may undermine the social cohesion that is necessary to support future learning.
In a standard neo-classical context, firms will always find the best way to organize themselves. Policy makers and management will also tend to regard the choice of organizational form as something that definitely should be left to the firm to define and develop. This contrasts with the view on new technologies and especially information technologies where it is seen as being highly relevant to stimulate their diffusion. All my practical experience from the OECD and all my research make me believe that this represents a serious misallocation of policy efforts. Especially in the new economy, the social and private rates of return to new forms of organization and to new ways of enhancing the skills of employees are extremely high. In contrast, the speeding up of diffusion of information technology reinforces the so-called Solow paradox where productivity growth does not correspond to the use of advanced technology.
I strongly recommend readers to study carefully the different cases presented in this book. As indicated by the last few paragraphs, the change from technology to innovation policy has just began. To understand the specific barriers blocking this change and how they have been overcome in some countries may be helpful when it comes to taking the next steps.
Bengt-ke Lundvall
May 2002
The idea for this book was born in 1999, in a seminar held at Guildford, UK, where both co-editors met and soon engaged in discussions about how far different national technology policies in Europe have changed over the last few years. In the Spring of 2000, almost exactly one year after our meeting in England, we organized a seminar at Roskilde University, Denmark, under the auspices of the Danish Social Sciences Research Council, to discuss precisely this topic in a more systematic manner. The seminar was entitled The Innovation Policy Turn: Economic Ideas in the Re-Framing of Research and Technology Policy and 8 papers were presented there. We were delighted by the superb academic response to our call, and by the good atmosphere among participants all through the two working days of the seminar. We would like to thank Marianne Jlby and the other secretaries of the Department of Social Sciences for their invaluable organizational support.
