This special issue celebrates the work of Bengt-Åke Lundvall on his 70th birthday. In the 1980s and 1990s he was a key player among a small group of academics in the USA and Europe that developed a new, systemic approach to the study of the interactions between science, innovation, and policy....

Bengt-Åke Lundvall's work has underlined the importance of policy learning for inducing innovation systems' adaptability. In spite of his efforts and of the general interest in this topic, studies of policy learning in innovation policy continue to be scarce. Elaborating from recent theoretical...

This article asks whether it is possible to conceptualise the European Union (EU) as a system of innovation in accordance with the rich literature of institutional economics on these matters. By developing four further theoretical nodal points of the system of innovation concept, an analytical...

The patent system has gained political attention in both Europe and the US as the core regulatory regime of an increasingly knowledge-based economy. Both Europe and the US have recently engaged in a series of efforts to reform their patent systems. These efforts reflect a shift from a legal and...