What Do We Know about Innovation Policy?

This chapter reviews developments in both theory and practice across the different generations of science, technology and innovation (STI) policy with the aim to provide an overview of the growing STI literature and characterize the current status of STI policy. It shows that over time innovation policy has witnessed a cross-generational shift from a ‘too simple’ to a ‘too complex’ conceptualization of the innovation process. The chapter goes on to describe governance, coordination and change management challenges inherent in the design and implementation of transformative innovation policy and their implications for policy evaluation and impact assessment. Finally, it then moves on to review approaches characterizing impact evaluation in the three generations of innovation policies while paying specific attention to the evolutionary nature of innovation policy development and the co-existence of the three generations in contemporary evaluation practice.