Transformative innovation policy instruments

Resumo

The normative turn in the academic discourse and policy practice of Science, Technology and Innovation (STI) policies, illustrated by concepts such as transformative innovation policy or mission-oriented innovation policy, was triggered by the consensus that innovation has a fundamental role to play in the transition towards sustainability. However, this normative turn has yet to translate into a concurrent epistemic (r)evolution, involving a broader range of stakeholders such as the users of policy outcomes in the design and implementation of STI policies, as suggested in the prolific literature on innovation systems. Indeed, the new generation of policy instruments proclaiming a transformative rationale in their design fail to live up to the ambition of favoring the epistemic convergence of policy-making towards transformative objectives, since they are mostly incrementally adapted and combined for their new purpose. Departing from this lack of alignment between the normative turn in STI policy, and the epistemic imperative of adapting instrumentation processes (procedural approach) for an effective implementation of transformative policies (substantive approach), this dissertation introduces the concept of `transformative innovation policy instruments, explicitly recognizing users within the constellation of relevant actors for their design and implementation. They are thus defined as `integrating substantive and procedural effects in a user perspective of policy instruments that fosters the convergence of the normative and epistemic dimensions of transformative innovation policy goals. Grounded in a procedural approach to policy instruments, the findings show that the properties of complex innovation systems (emergence, interdependence and interconnectivity, co-evolution, self-organization, feedback, historicity and path-dependence) are useful to unravel the epistemic shift of transformative innovation policy instruments towards the inclusion of users.