Industrial policy has returned to centre stage after decades of neglect or worse, yet its revival is deeply ambivalent. This chapter argues that effective and desirable industrial policies rests on the alignment of three mutually reinforcing conditions, namely, first, public measures shaping the...

Academic freedom has come under growing strain across the world. To study whether and how academics react to political pressure, we exploit a natural experiment: the U.S. government's ''blacklist'' of undesirable words released in early 2025. We find that the release of this list leads to a...

Bridging together the Middle-Income Trap (MIT) literature with the Global Value Chains (GVCs) approach may provide a more fine-grained understanding of the middle-income (MI) countries' developmental dilemmas. While the former identifies the structural challenges these countries face, the latter...

Increasing rise of military and non-military security issues, globally, influences innovation policies and interacts with policy aspirations to address societal challenges, notably around sustainability transitions. Drawing from research on security, geopolitics, and transformative and...

Business dynamism has been slowing globally over the last several decades. In a recent study, Akcigit and Ates (2023) examine the relative importance of different channels behind this development and highlight weakened knowledge diffusion from the technology frontier to followers as a dominant...

Electric vehicles (EVs) are crucial for cutting transportation emissions, yet the policy drivers of EV innovation remain underexplored. This study analyzes firm-level panel data on EV and battery patents, covering more than 4,000 firms across 19 countries from 2010 to 2021, to assess how these...

Welfare services such as healthcare, elderly care, and education are key to ensuring quality of life generally, and vital for rural communities across urbanizing countries. While these sectors are largely tax-financed, several countries have established quasi-markets to achieve competition...

Green Deals have been introduced across Western economies as large-scale, mission-oriented innovation policies (MOIPs) intended to combine economic growth with environmental sustainability. Rooted in the concept of an "entrepreneurial state," these initiatives reflect renewed confidence in...

This essay examines the rise of "Green Deals" as large-scale state-sponsored active industrial policies to accelerate a transition toward climate neutrality. Building on the concept of mission-oriented innovation policy (MOIP), it documents how environmental and active industrial policies have...

The rapid rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI), particularly Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer (ChatGPT), is transforming how knowledge is produced and innovation unfolds across disciplines. To capture this shift, we analyze 13,942 peer-reviewed publications with Latent...

The transition from an industrial-based society to a knowledge-based society marks one of the most profound societal transformations of the modern era. This shift is driven by scientific progress, technological advancements, and innovation, thereby shaping economies and social structures....

Die Studie untersucht die Innovationsleistung und die Produktivitätsentwicklung der deutschen Wirtschaft unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Situation in mittelständischen Unternehmen und des Beitrags dieser Unternehmen zu Innovation und Produktivität. Datenbasis der Analysen ist des...

Germany and Europe are often said to lag behind the United States and China in the development and application of artificial intelligence technologies and other complementary technologies. Scientific, technological and ultimately economic performance in the field of this technology bundle, often...

Green investment has emerged as a crucial tool for sustainable development, but its determinants across heterogeneous regional contexts remain inadequately understood. This study examines determinants of green investment across Chinese provinces, focusing on R&D intensity, pollution control...

In this brief essay we shall consider some policy implications which arise from treating scientific expenditure as an investment producing national economic wealth. We shall seek to clarify this investment view, to link it with the question of selectivity in basic science and with the support of...

This study introduces a novel quantitative method to assess the willingness to pay for emerging technologies, such as hydrogen, as substitutes for fossil fuels in industrial production. A three-step framework is developed to derive the willingness-to-pay function based on industrial competition...

Large language models (LLMs) can lower the cost of producing complex text, potentially reshaping competition for research and development (R&D) funding to private firms. We provide the first evidence on this issue using data covering the universe of firm applications to a major competitive R&D...

Public-sector innovation is frequently portrayed as the domain of dedicated innovation labs and experimental units, obscuring how innovation capacity can emerge within core bureaucratic institutions. This article explores how Norway's Brønnøysund Register Centre (BRC), mainly a registry...

Focusing on the role of government industrial funds in bridging the equity gap, in this paper, we examine how the establishment of government industrial funds (GIFs) affects enterprise innovation and the underlying mechanism of the guiding and synergistic effects on social capital. By conducting...

This study systematically reviews 53 peer-reviewed articles on public sector innovation published between 2021 and 2025 to synthesize knowledge on how innovation is conceptualized, triggered, enacted, and constrained. Findings reveal that innovation is framed across technological,...

Sustainable innovation is important in Albania, a small transition economy facing pressures from digitalization, the green transition, and increased competition. Yet the country's innovation system is still developing, and academia-business linkages remain weak. This article investigates how...

This article explores how Third Space Professionals in Mode 3 universities help bridge academic research and real-world application, fostering innovation, entrepreneurship, and social progress. They play a key role in mentoring early-career researchers, particularly by involving them in research...

Competitive public research funding is an important policy instrument to foster scientific progress. The effective design of such funding schemes and whether they generate knowledge spillovers to industrial inventions, however, remains debated. In this paper, we investigate the impacts of...

Universities play a critical role in knowledge creation and technological innovation, serving as key drivers of regional development. However, existing research has paid limited attention to the mechanisms through which university innovation inputs translate into firm-level performance,...

This paper develops a transparent, simplified version of Carnehl and Schneider (2025)'s model of knowledge creation. Our tractable framework, which yields closed-form solutions for key welfare trade-offs, preserves the essential economic mechanisms while eliminating mathematical complexity. We...

The war in Ukraine has demonstrated how battlefields are evolving rapidly, with new technologies shaping military strategy and tactics. Increasingly, these new technologies are being provided by startup firms, rather than by established contractors. To incorporate these new firms into the...