Comparison of innovation policies in selected European, Asian and ...

innovation policy systems. Efforts have been given (see e.g., European Innovation Progress
Report 2008) to use the number of policy measures in certain policy areas, as an indicator of
policy efforts, but this is unsatisfactory as the metric is more likely to reflect organization of
policy delivery systems, rather than true policy efforts. A better metric would involve
capturing public budgets devoted to policy lines, but this is notoriously difficult to achieve.
This route has been tried, notably under the policy mix project 1 , in a limited way, and in
European Innovation Progress report 2009 2
. The lack of systematic data collection regarding
budgets, however, limits the possibilities for such analyses, as the information used is based
on publicly available budget-information.
For the purposes of this study, the framework data for each country were reviewed and
assessed in quantitative terms by experts within the field of innovation policy. Each of the
seven key dimensions of NIS was reviewed and for each country the dimension was rated on
a 1-5 scale (low to high), reflecting the importance to the country as judged by the policy
expert. The policy expert based their rating on the quantity of policy efforts (in terms of
budget, number of activities, actors, and measures) and the relative importance of these efforts
within the policy mix of the respective NIS. Regarding the first dimension of ‘innovation
policy governance structure’, the rating takes into account the number of recent policy
documents. Regarding the second dimension of ‘innovation policy strategic intelligence’ the
rating tries to summarize the quantity of policy efforts in terms of the instruments and
capacity for policy design and evaluation, including: strategic exercises, advisory bodies,
Foresights, evaluations, peer reviews, benchmarking, NIS studies, etc. Regarding the
remaining dimensions, the rating of policy efforts was primarily based on a combination of:
the number of policy measures, programmes or schemes, recently taken initiatives, and an
estimated share of the policy budget. In addition to the expert-assigned ratings of each
dimension of policy, the challenges faces each NIS were noted so that frequency of challenges
could be compared across nations included in the analysis.
This approach to documenting innovation systems is novel in several ways. First, it makes a
quantitative assessment, using a number of criteria, of the innovation system. This kind of
assessment has not been at the forefront of policy analysis to date. Second, it has a wide scope
and goes beyond European countries to include some from the Pacific Rim. Third, this
approach features broad coverage of policy issues and attempts to cover the innovation policy
system as a whole. This approach is limited in that it does not document innovation policy
outcomes.
In the approach taken by a New Zealand policy expert, a framework was developed in order
to highlight two main dimensions of innovation governance and policy challenges (based on
the OECD Governance of Innovation Systems 2005 report and the OECD Innovation Strategy
2010 report):
1. General structural characteristics of the NIS
2. Capabilities required for good governance.
1 Nauwelaers, C., Boekholt, P., Mostert, B., Cunningham, P., Guy, K., Hofer, R., and Rammer, C. (2009)
"Policy Mixes for R&D in Europe". Report to European Commission, Directorate-General for Research, UNU-
MERIT, Maastricht. May 2009.
2 http://proinno.intrasoft.be/admin/uploaded_documents/EIPR2009.pdf
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