IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/ecinnt/v32y2023i7p1037-1068.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Political failure: a missing piece in innovation policy analysis

Author

Listed:
  • Anders Kärnä
  • Johan Karlsson
  • Erik Engberg
  • Peter Svensson

Abstract

Within the field of innovation studies, researchers have identified systematic failures that hamper investment in R&D, innovation, and growth. Accordingly, researchers in this field often seek to provide policy recommendations on how to alleviate these failures. However, previous discussions have often been lacking considerations to the risks of political failures, meaning that policies fail to achieve their stated goals in a systematic manner. In response to this gap, this article aims to illustrate the concept of political failure and its relevance for innovation research. This is done by both discussing how political failure can impact innovation policy and by reviewing the prevalence of any discussions of political failure among top-ranked journals on innovation for the period 2010–2019, a total of 7161 articles. The results show that consideration of political failure is scarce, with a small number of papers that have a substantial analysis of political failures. If the awareness of political failures could be increased, this could lead to better policy recommendations with a more nuanced discussion of the risks and limitations of public policy.

Suggested Citation

  • Anders Kärnä & Johan Karlsson & Erik Engberg & Peter Svensson, 2023. "Political failure: a missing piece in innovation policy analysis," Economics of Innovation and New Technology, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 32(7), pages 1037-1068, October.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:ecinnt:v:32:y:2023:i:7:p:1037-1068
    DOI: 10.1080/10438599.2022.2070843
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/10438599.2022.2070843
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/10438599.2022.2070843?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Takashi Hirao & Yusuke Hoshino, 2024. "The Dysfunction of Mission-Oriented Innovation Policy: Impeding the Accumulation of Scientific Knowledge in the Japanese Academic Sector," Administrative Sciences, MDPI, vol. 14(6), pages 1-27, May.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:ecinnt:v:32:y:2023:i:7:p:1037-1068. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/GEIN20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.