Towards an Integrated Place-Based Innovation Policy

Innovation policy debates increasingly recognise societal challenges as drivers for innovation policy. This has motivated a ‘normative turn’ that advocates greater challenge orientation in innovation policy and targeted policies to articulate societal needs in order to deliver better innovations—not just more of them. In parallel, regional policy agendas, such as smart specialisation, focus on selectively building on unique, place-specific characteristics and assets, but it is somewhat agnostic about the direction of innovation. While mission-oriented and transformative, innovation policy agendas have been criticised for their lack of attention to context and the ‘messy realities’ of policy implementation, smart specialisation has been seen as too incremental, narrowing down the options and approaches for less developed regions and neglecting more transformative means of value capture. This talk aimed to bring together these top-down and bottom-up agendas, considered their key challenges and shortcomings, and discussed the need for an integrated place-based innovation and industrial policy.