The rise of systemic instruments in innovation policy

TLDR

Innovation practice, theory, and policy co‑evolve around five key functions—interface management, system organization, learning platforms, strategic intelligence infrastructure, and demand articulation—that shape modern innovation processes. The authors argue that developing systemic instruments can better align policy portfolios with actors’ needs and conduct an analysis of four such instruments to explore their characteristics, success factors, and development strategies. They analyze four avant‑la‑letter systemic instruments to assess their features, success and failure factors, and strategies for further development, effectiveness, and use. Their analysis shows that current policy instruments cover only a small portion of the five functions, are dominated by financial tools, and highlights the need for systemic instruments, offering best‑practice recommendations, policy suggestions, and avenues for future research.

Abstract

Starting from the co-evolutionary development of innovation practice, theory and policy, five functions are identified that play a crucial role in the management of present-day innovation processes: (1) management of interfaces, (2) (de-)construction and organising (innovation) systems, (3) providing a platform for learning and experimenting, (4) providing an infrastructure for strategic intelligence and (5) stimulating demand articulation, strategy and vision development. From a first analysis of innovation policy instrument portfolios, it is concluded that the already existing instruments only cover a small part of the five functions. Furthermore it is concluded that the portfolios are heavily dominated by financial instruments. It is argued that the development of a (relatively) new type of instrument, the systemic instruments, should be furthered in order to tune the instrument portfolio better to the needs of actors involved in innovation processes. In order to obtain a better insight into the characteristics of systemic instruments, their success and fail factors, and into strategies for their further development, effectiveness and use, an analysis of four systemic instruments avant la letter is presented. From this analysis, conclusions concerning the need for and best practice of systemic instruments are drawn, suggestions for policy are derived and questions for further research are proposed.