Charles Edquist

• Docent (Habilitation)
• Chair at Lund University

Public procurement for innovation (PPI) is a demand side innovation policy instrument. It occurs when a public organisation places an order for the fulfillment of certain functions or needs, which cannot be met at that moment or within a reasonable period of time through a new or improved product. Providing evidence of the benefits to public and p...

Who produces scientific and technical knowledge these days? What type of knowledge is being produced and for what purposes? Why are firms and governments funding research and development? This chapter studies the role of knowledge production (especially R&D activities) in the innovation process from an innovation system perspective. It examines how...

The main question that guides this paper is how governments are focusing (and must focus) on competence building (education, training and skills) when designing and implementing innovation policies. After a brief literature review, this paper suggests a typology of internal/external and individual/organizational sources of competences that are rela...

This paper aims to synthesize previous user innovation policy proposals into an adapted systems of innovation framework, on which a future holistic user innovation policy for the household sector can be based. We do this in three steps. First, we introduce the systems of innovation framework as a comprehensive basis for a holistic approach to innov...

Public procurement accounts for a very large share of most economies worldwide. This conceptual article argues that the key to achieving more innovations when pursuing public procurement is to describe problems to be solved or functions to be fulfilled (functional procurement) instead of describing the products to be bought (product procurement). C...

Who produces scientific and technical knowledge these days? What type of knowledge is being produced, and for what purposes? This chapter studies the role of public policy in knowledge production (especially R&D activities) relevant for the innovation process from a perspective of innovation systems. It identifies four typical policy-related obstac...

This chapter introduces the main idea of the book, namely, the theoretical foundations, the problem-oriented approach, and the focus on the instrument choices of an holistic innovation policy. The chapter argues that innovation studies have left unfinished the theoretical foundations for the design of innovation policy. The chapter also argues that...

This chapter develops the core of the argument regarding the specific assumptions and theoretical propositions about the role and limits of innovation policy. The theoretical basis for the holistic approach to innovation policy proposed in this book is built from a broad version of the systems of innovation approach and the identification of the co...

Public procurement occurs when public agencies purchase products (goods, services, and systems). The rationale, purpose, and starting point of public procurement should always be to solve societal problems, to satisfy human needs, or to meet global challenges, such as environmental and health problems. This chapter discusses how public procurement...

This chapter comes to grips with the nature of innovation and systems of innovation. It identifies ten specific activities that define systems of innovation. The ten activities are specific elements directly related to the performance of innovation, that collectively shape the way in which innovation takes place in an innovation system. We call thi...

Innovation systems cannot be conceptualized without understanding the interactions between different actors in the system. These interactions take many different forms. The scholarly literature has studied them with broad or narrow notions. This chapter aims at providing an encompassing view of these different phenomena, putting them directly into...

This book is about holistic innovation policy: its theoretical foundations, its problem-oriented approach, and its instrument choices. We start with the observation that most of the current innovation policies are not holistic because they only focus on a few determinants of innovation processes. This book provides a theoretically anchored foundati...

The main question that guides this chapter is how governments are focusing (and must focus) on competence-building (education, training, and skills formation) when designing and implementing innovation policies. After a brief literature review, this chapter suggests a typology of internal/external and individual/organizational sources of competence...

Organizations are crucial elements in innovation systems. Yet, their role is so ubiquitous that it is difficult to grasp and to examine all kinds of organization that are present in an innovation system. The purpose of this chapter is to define the conceptual basis of innovation policy in relation to the role of organizations, looking in particular...

Financing innovation processes is one of the crucial activities for developing commercially successful products and processes (innovations) and to facilitate their diffusion in the innovation system. This chapter addresses the rationales for public intervention, i.e. in which situations policy should be pursued in the field of financing. The chapte...

The purpose of this chapter is to discuss the different types of instruments of innovation policy, to examine how governments and public agencies in different countries and different times have used these instruments differently, to explore the political nature of instrument choice and design (and associated issues), and to elaborate a set of crite...

Institutions (including regulations) are constitutive elements of innovation systems. Some institutions are influenced by public actors, and they are elements of innovation policy. Focusing on (soft and hard) regulation, the chapter identifies the most salient regulatory areas from the perspective of the innovation system. When asking about the eff...

The purpose of this chapter is to provide a summary of the main arguments and conclusions in the book, and to highlight its main contributions. Taking the point of departure from the book’s analytical framework, and taking stock of the detailed considerations in its different chapters, this chapter looks into a series of issues related to the desig...

Article available here: https://charlesedquist.files.wordpress.com/2020/03/research-policy.pdf A holistic innovation policy is defined in this article as a policy that integrates all public actions that influence or may influence innovation processes. The Swedish National Innovation Council (NIC) was created by the Swedish Prime Minister, Stefan L...

Public procurement for innovation (PPI) is a powerful, underutilized demand-side innovation policy instrument. How this instrument can contribute to meeting societal challenges, which require goaloriented transformation of socio-technical systems, remains unclear and is explored in this article. This article draws on the transitions and PPI literat...

The European Union (EU) annually publishes an Innovation Union Scoreboard (IUS) as a tool to measure the innovation performance of EU Member States by means of a composite index, called the Summary Innovation Index (SII). The SII is constituted by an average of 25 indicators. The SII is claimed to rank Member States according to their innovation pe...

In cases where innovation indicators and data fail to serve properly as a (necessary) basis for the design of innovation policies, it often has its roots in conceptual unclarities in the underlying concepts. The aim of this paper is to provide a theoretical and conceptual basis for the design of innovation policy. This serves two important purposes...

Abstract The Swedish National Innovation Council (NIC) was created by the Prime Minister (Stefan Löfven) in February 2015, and it has now been operating for 18 months. It is personally chaired by the Prime Minister, which is unusual for such councils in other countries. Another atypical characteristic of the Swedish NIC is its dominant and wide foc...

The purpose in this paper is to show how public procurement can be a driver of innovation. The purpose and point of departure when using public procurement as an instrument of innovation policy is always to solve societal and environmental problems, to satisfy human needs or to meet global challenges. The paper is aimed at everyone who is involved...

According to the Innovation Union Scoreboard, published by the European Commission every year, Sweden has been, and still is, an innovation leader within the EU and one of the most innovative countries in Europe. In the Innovation Union Scoreboard 2014 (European Union, 2014: 5), Sweden has the top position (ranked number 1) of all EU28 Member State...

In 2006, the E uropean Commission introduced the concept of ‘pre‐commercial procurement’ ( PCP ) as an instrument to promote innovation and to mitigate grand challenges. One of the main motives for the support of PCP schemes was to use public needs as a driver for innovation. This concept was also introduced as a response to the need to reinforce t...

Institutions (including regulations) are constitutive elements of innovation systems, and therefore cornerstones of innovation policy. Focusing on (soft and hard) regulation, the paper identifies the most salient regulatory areas from the perspective of the innovation system. When asking about the effects of regulation on innovation, the paper argu...

The article stresses the role of product innovations for employment and growth and argues that a holistic innovation policy is important to enhance product innovations. He uses the policy area of public procurement, which is about 20 percent of GDP, as an example of how innovations can be stimulated without any additional costs. To enhance product...

The concept of a holistic innovation policy is defined in this article, with discussions of what it is, why it is relevant, and how it can be implemented to enhance product innovation. It is shown that the innovation sys-tems approach has diffused rapidly during the latest decades and has completely replaced the linear view in the field of innovati...

*A four-page summary in English is also included in the report. Offentliga upphandlingar kan bidra till, och vara en drivande kraft, för innovationer i samhället. För att åstadkomma detta krävs inga lagändringar. Däremot är det nödvändigt att politiker och beslutsfattare ger besked om att det ska genomföras sådana upphandlingar – och samtidigt tar...

The concept of a holistic innovation policy is defined in this paper, and it is discussed what it is, why it is relevant and how it can be implemented. One of the main conclusions is that the innovation policies in European countries are still linear (and not holistic), in spite of the fact that the linear view has been completely abandoned by inno...

The purpose of this article is to discuss the different types of instruments of innovation policy, to examine how governments and public agencies in different countries and different times have used these instruments differently, to explore the political nature of instrument choice and design (and associated issues), and to elaborate a set of crite...

The main question that guides this paper is how governments are focusing (and must focus) on competence building (education and training) when designing and implementing innovation policies. With this approach, the paper aims at filling the gap between the existing literature on competences on the one hand, and the real world of innovation policy-m...

This article focuses on Public Procurement for Innovation as a relevant demand-side instrument to be exploited in the mitigation of grand challenges. It intends to provide some clarification on what should (and what should not) be regarded as innovation procurement. It defines what is meant by Public Procurement for Innovation and categorizes it ac...

Ce chapitre porte sur la commande publique pour l’innovation, décrite comme une « politique de la demande », méritant d’être incluse dans la boîte à outils des dispositifs de soutien à l’innovation, et susceptible d’être utilisée pour répondre à de grands défis. Est déterminé ce qui relève, et ce qui ne relève pas, de la commande publique pour l’in...

This deliverable aims at providing an understanding of the role of demand in stimulating and enhancing knowledge-intensive entrepreneurship and the interdependencies of both. The ultimate goal is to provide a theoretical framework that allows to link public procurement policies with the development of knowledge intensive entrepreneurial activities....

This research aims at examining the impact of different socioeconomic configurations and models - that indicate different varieties of European capitalism- on the emergence and growth of knowledge - intensive entrepreneurship leading to innovative enterprises.Furthermore, linkages and interactions between innovation systems, business systems and so...

The aim of this report is to identify the role of academics as entrepreneurs. Education and a highly educated staff is a growth factor in companies and in this report we will highlight the characteristics of companies established by academics and which factors are crucial for these companies to grow. A special focus has been whether academics organ...

“Activities” in innovation systems are the determinants of the development and diffusion of innovations. Examples are R&D, provision of organizations and institutions, financing of innovations, incubation, etc. These activities are partly performed by private organizations and partly by public organizations, the latter performing tasks that constit...

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. He contributed to the popularity of the approach in the...

Small country innovation systems: Globalization, change, and policy in Asia and Europe (Simplified Chinese Translation). 作为以案例为基础的比较研究，《全球化、创新变迁与创新政策：以欧洲和亚洲10个国家（地区）为例》为我们展现了10个经济体（丹麦、芬兰、中国香港、爱尔兰、荷兰、挪威、新加坡、韩国、瑞典和中国台湾）创新系统的真实面貌；同时，对创新系统研究领域需要进一步澄清的基础理论问题进行了深入探讨和分析。《全球化、创新变迁与创新政策：以欧洲和亚洲10个国家（地区）为例》共12章，第1章着重讨论创新系统比较研究的基本理论与研究框架；第2章～第11章详细介绍了各国和地区案例；...

This comprehensive Handbook explores the interactions between the practice, policy, and theory of innovation. The goal is twofold: to increase insight into this dynamic process, searching for options to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of both policy and innovative practice, and to identify conceptual or empirical lacunae and questions that...

We welcome the basic ambition of the broad-based innovation policy. It provides a balance between the supply and demand sides of innovative activity, includes nontechnical innovations, as well as – besides direct economic impact – emphasizes wider societal considerations. Conceptually the new broad-based innovation policy is, however, fuzzy, and i...

This paper focuses upon the performance of innovation systems from an output perspective. Innovation performance measurement is considered as increasingly interesting by several scholars during last years. It is also important as basis for the design and implementation of innovation policies. Different methodologies dealing with innovation performa...

The vast literature of systems of innovation is rich in theoretical and empirical studies about the complexity and institutionally-embedded processes of interaction and learning. So far, however, this literature has not studied in a comprehensive manner the nature and types of strategic choices that public actors in systems of innovation are facing...

This paper focuses upon the performance of innovation systems from an output perspective. On it, we try to characterize some European countries according to seven innovation output indicators in the manufacturing and service sectors. The data are gathered from the Community Innovation Surveys between 1996 and 2006. Innovation performance measuremen...

Public organizations may place an order for something (normally a product or a system) that does not exist. This “something” has to be developed by the supplier before it can be delivered. In other words, R&D and/or innovation are needed before delivery can take place. Until about 10 years ago this phenomenon was called “public technology procureme...

This paper focuses on the systems-of-innovation (SI) approach and its policy implications. It introduces the topic by briefly reviewing the emergence, development, and diffusion of this approach and, then, spells out the constituents, activities, and boundaries of the SI approach. On this basis, the paper discusses the reasons for public policy int...

‘Activities’ in innovation systems are the determinants of the development and diffusion of innovations. (Examples are R&D, provision of organizations and institutions, financing of innovations, incubation, etc.) These activities are partly performed by private organizations and partly by public ones. Those performed by public organizations constit...

This chapter takes its point of departure in the so-called Swedish paradox, according to which the Swedish NSI is plagued by low pay-off in relation to very high investments in R&D and innovation efforts. Using new data, we show that this paradox is still in operation, i.e. the productivity or efficiency of the Swedish NSI remains low. We also spec...

This chapter is structured as follows. In the introductory section, the objectives of the “Small Country Innovation Systems” book project are outlined and the methodological and theoretical foundations of the book are ddressed. This is followed by an extended conceptual and theoretical discussion. Using the traditional systems of innovation approac...

The concluding chapter of the “Small Country Innovation Systems” book develops a comparative analysis that deals with only a very few of the many issues addressed empirically by the ten country case studies. The concluding chapter focuses to some extent on issues related to globalization, but devotes most of its attention to innovation policy. The...

This major book presents case studies of ten small country national systems of innovation (NSIs) in Europe and Asia, namely, Denmark, Finland, Hong Kong, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway, Singapore, South Korea, Sweden and Taiwan. These cases have been carefully selected as examples of success within the context of globalization and as ‘new economi...

Om Sverige vill fortsätta vara ett av världens främsta länder inom det biomedicinska området är det bråttom att vidta kraftfulla åtgärder. Statsministern och hans inre kabinett bör ta ledningen. Det är huvudslutsatsen i den här boken. Den sammanfattar vad en kvalificerad forskargrupp, understödd av en insiktsfull referensgrupp av praktiker, har ko...

From OECD: In many OECD countries, tertiary education systems have experienced rapid growth over the last decade. With tertiary education increasingly seen as a fundamental pillar for economic growth, these systems must now address the pressures of a globalising economy and labour market. Within governance frameworks that encourage institutions, in...

The main objective of this chapter is to discuss the implications of the adoption of the Systems of Innovation (SI) Approach in innovation policymaking. One of the main criticisms of the SI approach is the difficulty in translating it into real policymaking. This paper proposes a way of dealing with this complex problem. By breaking down the operat...

This paper discusses the implications of the adoption of the National Innovation Systems approach for innovation policy. It starts by positioning the systemic approach against other theoretical approaches, such as neoclassical theories. The authors argue that the adoption of one or the other frameworks leads to different criteria for intervention....

This article presents an overview and assessment of the systems of the innovation approach. It focuses mainly on national systems of innovation, but in addition it addresses sectoral and regional systems of innovation. This article addresses the emergence and development of the systems of innovation (SI) approach, its strengths and weaknesses, the...

Presented at the GLOBELICS 2006 conference in India during 4-7 October 2006. Session III.1 Innovation: Conceptual Issues

We review the literature on national innovation systems. We first focus on the emergence of the concept of innovation systems, reviewing its historical origins and three main flavours (associated to three “founding fathers” of the concept). After this, we discuss how the notion of innovation systems filled a need for providing a broader basis for i...

This concluding article takes up some central theoretical aspects about the concept of system of innovation that were launched at the onset of this special issue. Acknowledging that the system of innovation approach is still not a theory in its own right, further efforts for theory development will focus on the main activities performed by the syst...

Introduction: This chapter focuses upon the “new” parts of the telecommunications sectoral system of innovation. This means that we concentrate on analyzing innovation in fixed data communications (including the Internet) and mobile telecommunications (including the mobile Internet). We largely disregard, for example, traditional telecommunications...

Introduction: It is generally accepted that governments have an important role to play in fostering the conditions supporting innovation and competitiveness. The economic and political discourse on these issues reflects existing political debates about the capacities of firms and the market mechanisms to deliver desired outcomes. For about forty y...

The literature on innovation systems has provided substantial description and analysis of the relationship between innovation, learning and economic performance. This approach argues that systemic relations among different elements in the innovation process stimulate innovation performance. This paper sets out to examine and describe the innovation...

The European Council in Barcelona set an overall EU R&D investment target of 3% of GDP by the year 2010, with industry asked to contribute two thirds of this figure. To approach these levels, however, dramatic improvements are needed in the effectiveness of policies used to stimulate private sector R&D. The specific aim of this report is to offer...

This book examines the ‘new’ areas of telecommunications technology, focusing particularly on fixed data communications (including the internet) and mobile telecommunications (including the mobile internet). A sectoral systems of innovation approach is used as a conceptual framework for the analysis of the telecommunications sector, in terms of equ...

Many innovations arise spontaneously as a result of the market mechanism and the actions of capitalist firms, but some, especially the more radical ones, require public intervention. The first part of this chapter discusses when such policy interventions might be necessary and why. The next section discusses selectivity in innovation policy. The la...

Inom Regeringskansliet pågår ett arbete med att utveckla en svensk innovationspolitik. Det har att göra med det faktum att den svenska välfärdssutvecklingen under lång tid har varit sämre än i vår omvärld kombinerat med en insikt om att den viktigaste källan till långsiktig tillväxt är just innovationer. Målsättningen är att genom innovationspoliti...

The focus of this article is on product innovations introduced by firms (establishments) and the collaborations they enter into with other firms and organizations in carrying out this activity. The theoretical framework combines innovation theories with the literature on regional innovation systems and the knowledge-based economy. Empirically we ha...