Rebalancing The Innovation Policy Debate

Innovation, the successful exploitation of new ideas, is an important driver of economic growth. The traditional view of innovation as a pipeline process based around commercialising scientific or technological invention has today been replaced by a broader understanding that innovationis not necessarily linear and reaches far beyond the production of products to be focused on successful market outcomes. Based on the authors' experience of innovation policy development in Scotland, this paper concludes that there needs to be a dramatic change in approach to innovation policyif Scotland is to sustain long-term economic growth and competitive advantage.