Future governance of innovation policy in Europe - three scenarios

In Europe, public research, technology and innovation policies are no longer exclusively in the hands of national authorities: increasingly, national initiatives are supplemented by or even competing with regional innovation policies or transnational programmes, in particular, the activities of the European Union. At the same time, industrial innovation increasingly occurs within international networks. Are we witnessing a change of governance in European innovation policy? Based on a set of hypotheses concerning the co-evolution of "political systems" and "innovation systems" in Europe, the paper speculates about the future governance of innovation policies, trying to pave the ways for empirical analyses. It sketches three scenarios stretching from (1) the idea of an increasingly centralised and dominating European innovation policy arena to (2) the opposite, i.e. a progressive decentralisation and open competition between partly strengthened, partly weakened national or regional innovation systems, and finally to (3) the vision of a centrally "mediated" mixture of competition and co-operation between diverse regional innovation cultures and a related governance structure. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.