40 Innovation Policy and Sustainable Development - IWT

ABSTRACT
This volume of IWT-Studies brings together
most of the contributions to the Conference
on ‘Innovation Policy and Sustainable
Development. Can public incentives make a
difference’ held in Brussels, in February 2002.
The Flanders 2002 Conference of the Six
Countries Programme (SCP), organised by
IWT with the assistance of Technopolis
Group, can be regarded as a follow-up to
the earlier SCP-Conference organised in
1996 by IWT in Ghent under the title ‘R&D
subsidies at stake In search of a rationale
for public funding of R&D’. The issue of the
‘additionality’ of innovation policy now has
been enlarged to the contribution to innovation
performance for wider, societal goals
as sustainable development.
The papers are organized in three blocks.
The first, introductory one is on the interplay
between innovation and environmental
policy. The second one deals with the question
of evaluating the effectiveness of innovation
policy as such: does it ‘make a difference’
(the additionality issue). The third
block presents country case studies of environmentally
sustainable innovation that all
entail a particular kind of integration of
innovation and environmental policy. A
summary presents conclusions from this conference
and implications for further work.
1. SETTING THE SCENE
The Position Paper by Patries Boekholt and
Jan Larosse starts from the observation that
the rationale for innovation policy has been
strengthened from a system perspective. It
can meet the agenda of sustainable development
in terms of innovation for societal
objectives. From an economic perspective
the missions of innovation policy -reducing
market failures due to positive externalities
of knowledge production and usage- and of
environmental policy -reducing the negative
externalities of non-sustainable technologies-
can be combined. On the agenda is
how to operate an horizontal policy that
effectively realizes this goal: is innovation
policy effective as a policy instrument, and
can it be part of a policy mix that levies
progress to sustainable development
A first series of conference papers was delivered
by the keynote speakers, invited to ‘set
the scene’, and introduce the two policy traditions
that are challenged to contribute
together to environmentally sustainable
growth.
Ken Guy starts with drawing some lessons
on the effectiveness of present day innovation
policy from a system perspective.
Innovation policy is now expected to serve
several masters. Exploring the possibilities of
interaction between innovation and environmental
policies, he suggests that a beneficial
combination has to answer two different
questions: what can innovation policy
do for sustainable development, and what
can environmental policy do for innovation.
Applying a successful broad mix requires
high levels of ‘strategic intelligence’.
The second paper was presented by George
Heaton, who introduced the metaphor of
‘an arranged marriage’ to describe the difficulties
and opportunities involved in matching
two parties that have a lot in common,
both are not able to get acquainted without
special commitment and special changeagents.
There is a clear under-investment in
next generation technologies by the environmental
industry, but there is a need to
frame these technology developments in
new, transformative technological pathways.
The paper of René Kemp is included in this
introductory series because it outlines the
need for an integrated policy approach
towards innovation for the environment. It
outlines the model of transition management
as a policy approach that can add topdown
elements of system innovation (longterm
ambition) to bottom-up initiatives
(short-term concerns).
2. DOES INNOVATION POLICY MAKE
A DIFFERENCE
The three following papers deal with the
question of additionality - what would have
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