Promoting inclusive innovation for disabled people in four countries: who does what and why?

Abstract

Disability policy is often characterized as comprising three different components: citizenship rights, labor market integration and social protection. In this study, we present a fourth component – disability-related innovation. Specifically we analyze two critical interrelated questions: what governments do to guide innovation in this area; and do patterns of greater government disability policy involvement in social-democratic welfare states apply in the case of innovation? Utilizing a qualitative comparison of Germany, Israel, Sweden and the United States, we find that while policy across all countries is at first glance decisively similar, the important differences that exist cannot be satisfactorily explained within the classical welfare state typology framework. Countries that are leaders in terms of social support for disabled people – Germany and Sweden – are not necessarily leaders in disability-related innovation. This is particularly noticeable in the case of programs for support of Assistive Technology development.

Points of interest

• This study characterizes and compares innovation policy as it applies to disabled people in Germany, Israel, Sweden and the United States.

• Innovation policy’s two main components are regulation that requires Universal Design, which requires that new technologies are designed to be usable by disabled people as well as others, and financial and institutional support for the development of Assistive Technologies.

• Cross-country ideological and political differences fail to explain differences in disability-related innovation because innovation policymaking tends to be apolitical.

• Only Israel and the United States created government programs dedicated to the support of Assistive Technology development.

• To better serve disabled people, policymakers should formalize and fully support the development of Assistive Technology, as well as expand Universal Design regulation and enforcement.

Keywords:

• Disability policy
• innovation policy
• Universal Design
• Assistive Technology development

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Ruth Zait for her invaluable research assistance. We thank Roni Holler and Goldie Nejat for their insightful comments. Nicole Gladstone and Tessa MacNeil collaborated with the authors on a previous project that contributed to the work presented here. A previous version of this article was presented at the Policy Complexity of Technology and Innovation section at the annual conference of the American Political Science Association (Washington, DC, 28 August–1 September 2019) and the Innovation Policy Lab brown bag series. The authors thank all of the participants for their useful comments. All views and all the mistakes are solely those of the authors.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

Research for this article was generously supported by a gift from Canadian Friends of Tel Aviv University; Israel Science Foundation [grant 959/15]; Lupina Foundation; Innovation Policy Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto.