Innovation policy instruments for grand challenges: targeting constellations of diverse R&I actors?

ABSTRACT

Many countries have created research and innovation (R&I) policy instruments with the mission of addressing grand challenges. The new policy rationale suggests that these instruments must target civil society actors in new and more diverse constellations, combining them with ‘traditional’ R&I actors (universities and firms). Investigating the extent to which policy instruments are designed according to this requirement, this paper analyses co-occurrences of targeted R&I actors in science, technology and innovation policy instruments and identifies five typical constellations of targeted R&I actors. We focus on two constellations that are likely to include civil society actors. Wide constellations (dominated by universities and firms) are positively associated with grand challenge policy instruments. Civil-society-led constellations are less heterogeneous and possibly associated with grand challenge instruments. This original contribution shows partial consistency between the grand challenge policy rationale and its instruments, and evidence of civil-society-led actor constellations not yet considered in the literature.

KEYWORDS:

• Grand challenges
• transformative innovation policy
• innovation policy instruments
• policy mix
• mission innovation

JEL:

• O31
• O38
• O33

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ OECD’s term ´initiative’ is not used in the academic literature of policy analysis; likewise, OECD’s term ‘instrument’ is usually referred to as ‘measure’ in the academic literature. In this paper, we follow the terminology in the academic literature of policy analysis.

² Hence, we are not studying the performance of these policy instruments in terms of the actual funded/supported project consortia. See the last section of this paper about the limitations of this study, and possible future research.

³ As described, we removed policy strategies from the data set prior to conducting our analyses. However, some strategies remained in the data set since they were classified as policy instruments.

⁴ As Table I in the Appendix shows, our sample contains only one observation from each of South Africa and Slovakia. The fixed effects for these countries were not the cause of the problem of complete separation.

⁵ For example, the data are actually available for the European Union framework programs and for many national in Europe, the data is actually available, such as through the data infrastructure RISIS (risis2.eu).