Next-Generation Innovation Policy and Grand Challenges

Abstract

The paper explores transformative ways to address Grand Challenges, while locating them in a broader diagnosis of ongoing changes. Coping with Grand Challenges is a challenge in its own right, for policy as well as for science, technology, and innovation actors. The paper presents building blocks for a next generation of innovation policies, and it discusses the opportunities offered by new constellations of actors and their concertation. Future innovation policy designs can build on ‘creative corporatism’, a concept in which governments (or related international alliances) can adopt the crucial role of facilitating broader, more diverse ‘varieties of cooperation’ in advanced capitalist economies.