From National System of Innovation to “Public Sphere for Innovation”: Mission-Oriented Innovation Policy and the Changing Institutional Configuration

As one of the possible solutions to the current socioeconomic problems, several novel approaches to innovation policy have been proposed and adopted by advanced countries that seek to foster innovation to stimulate productive investment and solve major societal challenges, such as health and environmental crises. This type of policy approach is often referred to as “mission-oriented innovation policy” (MOIP) because it encourages governments to set up various missions and invest resources to steer private sector innovation in particular directions. While MOIP may well be an appropriate approach for the current historical stage of techno-economic as well as capitalist development, proponents of MOIP overestimate the policy capacity of governments to steer innovation in particular directions. Moreover, they do not consider the risk of MOIP turning into an unproductive rent-seeking opportunity. In this context, this chapter explores the institutional underpinnings of MOIP through the cases of MOIP implementation in Finland, where innovations in specific fields that solve societal problems faced by cities are promoted by creating institutional conditions that enable private companies to develop and demonstrate their products in public facilities and infrastructure and to receive feedback on their innovations. Based on the analysis of the cases, it is argued that instead of the concept of national system of innovation, an alternative concept, “public sphere for innovation,” is introduced as a more appropriate one to explicitly capture the institutional context of the evolutionary processes of MOIP, which includes dissonance, conflict, dialogue, and openness.