Innovation Policy Studies Between Theory and Practice: A Literature Review Based Analysis

This paper reviews the emerging literature on innovation policy from a practitioner’s perspective, reviews the policy implications of an evolutionary perspective in economics, and identifies newly emerging areas of innovation policy analysis. We show that an innovation system is a dominant policy discourse, that there are limits of policy implications from an evolutionary perspective, and that there is a need for explicitly policy motivated analysis grounded in a broad evolutionary perspective. Innovation policy studies are an area in pre-paradigmatic stages whose dynamism originates from the interaction of theory, policy, and policy learning. The limited usefulness of policy implications derived directly from either conceptual or empirical analysis requires more explicitly policy focused research. keywords: innovation policy, technology policy, evolutionary economics, innovation system, innovation studies