Established in 1975, the 6 Countries Programme provides a platform for critical discussion and analysis of innovation policy issues and for exchanges of experiences and best practices in the fi eld. Its primary objectives are to contribute to a broader understanding of innovation processes and their impact on economies and societies, to anticipate future policy needs, and to foster greater cooperation among policy researchers and decision-makers from both government and business sectors.
“Why do countries differ in their ability to translate knowledge into economic growth and can policy make a difference?
This question was explored in a Six Countries Programme workshop (Bilbao, September 2009). Although the Innovation Systems approach is increasingly used to expand our understanding, actual innovation policies and more in particular the budget and other resource allocations are still mainly guided by a neoclassical macro-economic interpretation. This neoclassical framework does not provide satisfactory treatment of innovation, mainly because economic agents and markets do not innovate in the way the standard neoclassical models assume. The authors in this book analyse the directions where we need to look for new concepts and new rationales for innovation policy in order to address innovation as search and learning processes".
Innovation and the term “innovation policy” has become fashionable. Although the term is quite new many of the elements of innovation policy are not. In fact many of the innovation policy “tools” have existed for a long time but under other names such as industrial policy, technology policy, science policy etc (Lundvall and Borras 2004). This points to the possibility that there may be a lot windowdressing going on in this area, e.g, that existing policy schemes, introduced – perhaps – for reasons that have little to do with innovation, are continued under a new and (currently) more fashionable umbrella. At least this is what happened in my own country, Norway, in 2004 when several different public organisations, dealing with everything from export promotion to regional development, were merged as “Innovation Norway”. Despite its name most of its resources continue to go activities that has little to do with innovation in any meaningful sense of the word (Fagerberg 2009). Hence, there appears to be good reasons for critically examining the innovation policy mix (in any country not just Norway!).
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