Transformative (Innovation) Policy: Moving towards a more differentiated debate

Transitions, mission-orientation, disruptions, agility and other similar concepts have become very popular in policy and research circles in recent years. This interest is driven on the one hand by the recognition that several socio-technical systems need to change fundamentally to move onto a sustainable development path, and on the other hand by growing concerns about the potentially disruptive - both positive and negative - consequences of emerging technologies. While these concepts are all reflecting the perception that we are living in turbulent times, the fuzziness of this multitude of concepts makes a transparent debate about what we call transformative innovation policy (TIP) difficult. The most tragic case in this regard is the notion of `missions´, which has by now been used and abused for a wide range of purposes. While the notion of `missions´ is certainly a reflection of a fundamental change in thinking about the purposes of innovation policy, and a trigger of serious efforts to establish new and challenging practices of innovation policy and funding, there are also several attempts to just label established practices and approaches as missions in order to `sell old wine in new bottles´. With this paper, we make an attempt to revisit a range of research and policy practice streams that have been developed over the past years around this idea of making innovation policy - both demand- and supply-side - more transformative, and to systematise these streams into a typology of transformative innovation policy approaches on grounds of a select set of distinctive key dimensions. We aim to address TIP not only from the normatively inspired sustainability transitions perspective, but also from the angle of technological developments with a disruptive potential and attempts to prepare innovation systems structurally for the more turbulent times to come. In this sense, the role of policy may be to both facilitate transformative change along novel pathways, and to contain potentially negative consequences of developments that escape the influence of government policy. In our paper, we trace the historical roots of various inroads to transformative (innovation) policy and concentrate on the various lines of reasoning that have emerged since the strategic and normative turn in R&I policy around ten years ago. From this review, we extract five main lines of reasoning on transformative change, which underpin corresponding rationales and approaches to transformative innovation policy. These five types are exemplified by current examples of innovation policy initiatives that aim to drive transformative change through combinations of supply side, demand side and structural policy instruments, as well as by different governance philosophies. We argue that transformative innovation policy needs to be based on a more differentiated understanding of the modalities and pathways of how transformative change comes about, and that the instruments and governance approaches applied need to be coherent with these modalities and pathways.