Innovation as a Collective Action Challenge

Innovation – the process of transforming research ideas into marketable products and services – requires the collaboration of multiple actors across a variety of interactive situations. Increasingly, innovation is recognized as an important driver of economic growth and human development. Understanding the contexts within which these actors – including researchers, university administrators, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, private corporations, and public officials – solve recurrent and often complex problems of collective action is therefore of interest to analysts and policymakers. This task begins with the broader theoretical understanding, emphasized by Austrian economists, of the economy as an intricate, interactive, and interconnected system. In complement, the applications to practical policy analysis, developed by Vincent Ostrom and Elinor Ostrom and their colleagues at the Bloomington School, emphasize the role of crafting rules and designing policies to solve recurrent problems of collective action.