Innovation policy as an instrument for driving transformation: lessons from practice

Sofia Avdeitchikova and Sylvia Schwaag Serger

Chapter 7 in The New Role of the State for Transformative Innovation, 2026, pp 108-128 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: In recent years, countries, regions, municipalities and the EU Commission have introduced a significant number of innovation policy initiatives under the banner of ‘missions’, ‘societal challenges’, sustainability, and ‘transformation’, or systemic change. In parallel, there has been a rapidly growing body of literature seeking to analyze or assess these real-world manifestations of attempts to pivot innovation policy towards environmental and societal challenges. The aim of this chapter is to provide a reflexive overview of state of the art of the knowledge on transformative innovation policy design and implementation. To contribute real-world, real-time learning for planned or ongoing policymaking, the authors also synthesize lessons and insights from recent policy initiatives in Sweden, Finland and the Netherlands, with the purpose of distilling them into policy-relevant observations. Based on these, they draw conclusions on what recent experiences from trying to design and implement transformative innovation policies in the respective national and institutional contexts tell us about the role of innovation policy, and implicitly, the role of the state, in driving transformation.

Keywords: Innovation Policy; Transformation; Missions; Societal Challenges; Public Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
ISBN: 9781839100253
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/doi/10.4337/9781839100260.00013 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:eechap:19424_7

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jack Sweeney ().