Evidence-based portfolios of innovation policy mixes: A cross-country analysis

In the past decade many papers have discussed innovation policies in terms of their design, assessment and impact. Drawing on those contributions, the EC-OECD STIP Compass suggests a detailed taxonomy of innovation policies with regard to their themes, target groups of beneficiaries and instruments. Implemented with a web platform, that taxonomy has promoted an extensive collection of information on innovation policy initiatives across OECD member countries. Using the STIP dataset, in this paper we employ that taxonomy to identify the innovation policy mixes by referring to all the dimensions encompassed in each policy initiative, i.e., themes, targets, instruments. The evidence-based multidimensional analyses yield a typology and set of topics of innovation policy mixes that we use to conduct a cross-country analysis of innovation policy portfolios. Although the results of the cross-country analysis are statistically significant, caution is necessary when using them because of three main fragilities of the current version of STIP Compass: the absence of information on innovation policies at subnational level; the classification of the largest group of target beneficiaries, i.e. innovation intermediaries; the quality of some information essential for enhancing the analysis. The proposed navigation of the STIP Compass data is freely accessible online.