The evolution of the national innovation system as programmatic policy idea in Finland

This article studies the idea of a national innovation system (NIS) as a policy program. Previous research has addressed NIS as a policy idea in the context of expert discourse or as normative frames in policy discourse. The idea has not yet been studied as a policy program that explicitly coordinat...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Science & public policy 2021-04, Vol.47 (6), p.834-843
Main Authors: Alaja, Antti, Sorsa, Ville-Pekka
Format: Article
Language:English
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Summary:This article studies the idea of a national innovation system (NIS) as a policy program. Previous research has addressed NIS as a policy idea in the context of expert discourse or as normative frames in policy discourse. The idea has not yet been studied as a policy program that explicitly coordinates public policymaking. In this article, we study the programmatic idea of NIS and its status and impacts in the coordination discourses of Finnish policymaking in 1990–2019. We find that the idea of NIS was omnipresent in Finnish policy programs of the 1990s and 2000s, but lost its programmatic status in the 2010s. We show how Finnish policymakers explicitly deployed the idea to prescribe budget allocations and new legislation. The findings suggest that the idea was given a tangible but, compared with the breadth of the idea, relatively narrow role in coordinating public policy.
ISSN:0302-3427
1471-5430
DOI:10.1093/scipol/scaa045