Drivers of environmental innovation - Vinnova

and their interaction. It opens up to innovation policies that focus on the
shaping of technological variety, that is, on the generation and selection
mechanisms. Not only is R&D included here, but so are other policy domains
such as education, competition and labour markets. Government should design
an institutional system that facilitates innovation activities in firms. This
ensures that there are many possible areas for initiatives. These initiatives
should also be co-ordinated at the ministerial and public agency levels. Due to
the complexity of innovation systems there is also a justification for policy
experimentation. This in turn means that the evaluation of initiatives are
necessary, to ensure policy learning and for avoiding government failure. There
is no optimal innovation policy and policy-making must be based on informed
use of theory, information and subjective judgement. There is a need for an
adaptive policy maker, as opposed to an optimising policy maker, and policy
learning as an integrated part of the policy-making process. In this approach
the policy maker is not seen not as being superior to firms as knowing different
things than firms (Hauknes and Norgren 1999).
The innovation system approach also stresses that policy makers are not
independent of the firms were innovation takes place. Rather they should be
seen as actors in the system, interacting with the other actors. The multitude of
factors influencing innovative behaviour and the two-way relationship between
policy makers and firms, means that policy instruments can not be understood
in a simple stimulus response model. The stimulus and the response go both
ways. Thus policy instruments should not be conceived as abstract rules
imposed by government guaranteeing a specific outcome in firms, but rather as
social interaction. An extreme version of this argument is presented by Kemp,
“The significant choice is not among abstractly considered policy instruments
but among institutionally determined ways of operating them” (Kemp,
Forthcoming). Interaction between firms and policy makers takes place in both
policy design and policy implementation.
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