Social innovation is once more an increasingly popular notion circulating as an apparent means to solve the Grand Challenges of the 21st Century. But this common-sense idea of social innovation is based on a quasi-concept, where processes of innovation are absent. To restore some academic rigour...

Some universities and departments have been very successful in stimulating university spin-off firms (USOs). This has persuaded policy makers and university administrators to devote considerable resources to improve universities' capabilities to promote USOs, but with little tangible results....

Many countries have a sector of research institutes that have been set up to promote industrial growth and help with users’ problem solving. Not formally part of the higher education sector, research institutes are significantly less understood and studied than universities. This paper and...

Entrepreneurial scientists who patent, start spin-off companies and commercialise in other ways are usually seen as occupying a dual role with one leg each in the academic world and another in the entrepreneurial world. This article instead argues that many entrepreneurial scientists should be...

Local research units, this article argues, play a very important role for the scientific field they belong to, for example by mobilizing financial support, offering job opportunities, attracting talented recruits, and providing adequate training. Little is known, however, about such units, at...

During the 1950s and 1960s, a coherent system of economic policies was implemented in Norway. The article analyses the origins and functioning of this Norwegian model and shows how it broke down under the influence of both external and internal pressures from the mid-1970s onwards. By the early...

Europe is confronted by an intimidating triple challenge - economic stagnation, climate change, and a governance crisis. This paper demonstrates how the three challenges are closely inter-related, and discusses how they can be dealt with more effectively in order to arrive at a more economically...

Do the additionality effects of R&D tax credits vary across sectors? The paper presents a microeconometric analysis of this question for three countries: Norway, Italy and France. We use a panel of firm-level data from three waves of the Innovation Surveys carried out in these countries,...

The term 'innovation policy' started to penetrate the policy discourse a few decades ago and it may be time to take stock of what is learnt and consider what the challenges for the theory and practice in this area are. This paper contributes to this process by focusing on the extent to which we...

This paper analyzes factors shaping technological capabilities in United States and European countries, and shows that the differences between the two continents in this respect are much smaller than commonly assumed. The analysis demonstrates a tendency towards convergence in technological...