INNOVATION POLICY IN CROATIA BETWEEN INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY AND ECONOMY OF KNOWLEDGE

Based on a discourse analysis of 22 semi-structured interviews with innovation policy stakeholders and relevant public documents, the authors present the issues of the innovation policy agenda in Croatia in the EU accession process and after the accession, emphasizing the presence of industrial and knowledge economy ideas in the discourses on innovation policy in the decade spanning from 2006 to 2016. The policy-making process was marked by an insufficiently coherent interpretation of innovation policy and neglect of the institutional context. The authors conclude that the idea of knowledge economy, as a fundamental idea present in innovation policy, was only normatively accepted due to the requirements of the European Union to legitimize the interests of political actors, while in reality the working ideas were those of economy of scale and simplified linear model of innovation process that negatively affect the possibility of policy change and the creation of an integrated innovation policy. The findings suggest that innovation policy is not understood as a policy that integrates sectoral policies: science, industry, technology and entrepreneurship development. The idea of a national innovation system is used only as a metaphor for the integration of sectoral policies, while the actual integration in the form of a system is not realized, and the operationalization of this idea is reflected in the effort to centralize the management of the actors who should make up the elements of the system. The absence of a functional integrated innovation policy is one of the institutional obstacles to the development of the proclaimed know ledge economy.