Everywhere innovation has become a buzzword: in academic journals, popular media, corporate promotional materials and government strategies. The use of the word has rapidly expanded from a noun to its various hyphenated transmutations. Thus, today we don’t only talk of the importance of innovation to societies, but often the importance of specific types of innovation too, such as green innovation, social innovation, open-innovation. The innovation jargon has expanded exponentially with colourful analogies ranging from innovation corridors, clusters, poles, and valleys, to “disruptive” , ‘radical’and ‘incremental’ innovations.
Not surprisingly then, the average policymaker finds herself lost in the maze of innovation studies jargon. Academics and researchers of innovation have produced a new genre of literature that is difficult to use in order to generate effective (policy) solutions. In fact, little in the way of standard public policy analysis finds its way into innovation policy work and hence too often the political, social, and economic feasibility of many recommendations is not taken into consideration.
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Sami Mahroum |
One reason for this is the tendency of many innovation policy analysts to focus primarily on the big picture, such as the industrial structures of nations, their business cultures, education systems, and legislative frameworks. As a result, governments are often offered recommendations requiring some major socio-economic changes, ranging from calls to overhaul existing educational systems to calls for centralising (or decentralising) governance structures. The malleability, risks and costs of such recommendations often go unnoticed, and the policymaker becomes either sceptical or dismissive despite the validity of many such calls.
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Author: by Sami Mahroum
