New Economic Ground for Innovation Policy

Lennart Elg - VINNOVA & Jos Leijten (Eds.)

CULTIVALIBROS, www.cultivalibros.com

Why do countries differ in their ability to translate knowledge into economic growth and can policy make a defference?

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 analyse the directions where we need to look for new concept and new rationales for innovation policy in order to address innovation as search and learning processes.