The State of Uncertainty - Innovation Policy Through Experimentation - NESTA

An interesting new paper in the Provocation Series from NESTA UK entitled "The State of Uncertainty - Innovation Policy Through Experimentation" explores the notion of innovation policy and concludes rather naively in my view "the basic problem that constrains innovation, and the main resource that propels it, is uncertainty and its resolution. This should be the focus of innovation policy. Our proposal suggests both a more powerful strategy and potentially also a more cost effective one than the traditional approach. But it will require that innovation policy be introduced, and applied, in a scientific (learning-focused) rather than political (influence-based) frame of mind." Two problems with this conclusion.

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Is it possible to have a creative bureaucracy?

Is it possible to have a creative bureaucracy in governments? Charles Landry attempts to give us answer.

Creative Bureaucracy - Charles Landry from Mars Horodyski on Vimeo.

Why Government Policy Makers and Academics Are Confused About Innovation

Everywhere innovation has become a buzzword: in academic journals, popular media, corporate promotional materials and government strategies. The use of the word has rapidly expanded from a noun to its various hyphenated transmutations. Thus, today we don’t only talk of the importance of innovation to societies, but often the importance of specific types of innovation too, such as green innovation, social innovation, open-innovation. The innovation jargon has expanded exponentially with colourful analogies ranging from innovation corridors, clusters, poles, and valleys, to “disruptive” , ‘radical’and ‘incremental’ innovations. Not surprisingly then, the average policymaker finds herself lost in the maze of innovation studies jargon. Academics and researchers of innovation have produced a new genre of literature that is difficult to use in order to generate effective (policy) solutions. In fact, little in the way of standard public policy analysis finds its way into innovation policy work and hence too often the political, social, and economic feasibility of many recommendations is not taken into consideration.

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