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Innovation policy and
information technology
Martin Weiss
School of Information Sciences
University of Pittsburgh
mbw@pitt.edu
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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Topics
 What is innovation policy?
 What is the role of IT in innovation?
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Some definitions
 Innovation
 “the implementation of a new or significantly improved product (good or
service), or process, a new marketing method, or a new organizational method
in business practices, workplace organization or external relations”
(OECD/Eurostat, 2005)
 Not just processes or products that are “new to the world” but also to the
absorption and productive use of technology that is “new to the firm” or “new to
the region”
 Broader meaning
 Scientific inspiration transformed into new products, processes and services to
improve people’s lives
 Allows countries to greatly improve productivity and thus economic growth
 Leads to better standards of living and increased national competitiveness
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Should government get involved in
innovation?
 A matter of political philosophy?
 Resolve market failure?
 Innovation as a quasi-public good that is under- provisioned Winter (1959)
 Manage risk and uncertainty
 Resolve systemic failures?
 Complexity of technology and systems
 Path dependence and lock-in
 Economies of scale and scope in multi-disciplinary areas
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Broad context of
innovation policy
Policy goals
Outcomes
Actors
Source: OECD Science,
Technology and Industry
Outlook, 2014
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Scope of innovation policy
Necessary
Pre-condition
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• How does innovation work in general?
• How does this inform innovation policymaking?
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The innovation process
 Actors -- Organizations (e.g., firms,
universities, public research labs,
government ministries, etc.)
 Structures – Material factors that shape
the opportunities & constraints for
innovation
 Institutions – Rules of the game & codes of
conduct that reduce uncertainty
 Ideas – Socio-cognitive frameworks within
which actors carry out their activities
(e.g., world views, normative beliefs &
values, and the logics of appropriateness
held by actors & embodied in institutions)
Source: OECD Science,
Technology and Industry
Outlook, 2010
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Key activities in systems of innovation
 Provision of knowledge inputs to the
innovation process
 Provision of R&D results and creation of
new knowledge,
 Competence building, through formal
and informal learning
 Demand-side activities
 Formation of new product markets
 Articulation of new product quality
requirements emanating from the
demand side.
 Provision of constituents
 Creating and changing organizations
for developing new fields of innovation.
 Networking through markets and other
mechanisms
 Creating and changing institutions –
e.g., patent laws, tax laws,
environment and safety regs.
 Support services for innovating firms
 Incubation activities, e.g. providing
access to facilities, administrative
support for activiities
 Financing of innovation processes that
may facilitate commercialization
 Provision of consultancy services
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• What are some policy instruments?
• How would these be used to design a policy?
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A typology of innovation policy
instruments
Source: Borrás, S. and Edquist, C. “The choice of innovation policy instruments”
Technological Forecasting & Social Change 80 (2013) 1513–1522
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Dimensions of policy design
Domain areas
• Variety of sub-systems associated with innovation
performance
Rationales
• Justification for policy intervention
• Relate to the underlying causes of underperformance in particular domain areas
Strategic tasks
• Broad direction of policy intent
• Derived from the rationales for policy intervention
Instruments
• Techniques for structuring collective action to meet
strategic tasks
 These can be considered jointly (i.e., as a policy mix)
 Policy mix idea is also useful for considering issues of balance and
coherence of instruments within each dimension
Source: OECD Science, Technology and Industry Outlook, 2010
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Applications of the “policy mix” idea
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• What are some component tasks of an
innovation policy?
• How do countries compare in terms of their
general approaches?
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Goals and tasks of innovation policy
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Archetypes of innovation systems
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Topics
 What is innovation policy?
 What is the role of information technology in innovation?
 Innovation through IT
 Innovation of IT
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General role of IT in
innovation
IT
innovations
Experimental
design
 It is almost impossible to do research
without the use of IT!
 What is new about this?
Modelling
and/or
simulation
Data
analysis
Data
collection
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Implications
 The promise of IT enable new kinds of scientific questions
 These new lines of scientific inquiry require innovation in IT
 Systems design and architecture
 Algorithms
 Theory
 Advances in IT imply changes in the scientific workflows of all disciplines
 These new workflows must be supported by a newly conceived research
infrastructure
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What is a workflow? An example from
biology
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Supporting scientific workflows
Generating workflows
Collaboratories
Applications
Toolsets
Digital library repositories
Institutional systems
Data repositories
Data replication
Virtualized resources
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Workflow layer
 How can IT support collaboration for larger, complex workflows?
 What kinds of applications are available for scientific team members?
 What new tools are available
 Support workflow development and innovation
 Support communication among tasks in a workflow
 Support tasks of a workflow
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Support layer
 Why do we need a support layer?
 Scientific integrity
 Accountability
 Maximize public benefit from research
 Support layer questions
 What data from workflows should be stored?
 What is suitable metadata to make these data discoverable and usable?
 How are results published and tagged for discovery?
 How are replications of experiments supported?
 What formal instruments are appropriate (e.g., patents)?
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Infrastructure layer
 What services does the infrastructure layer provide?
 Storage of datasets
 Storage of reports
 Data movement
 Questions
 How can data be stored reliably over the long term?
 How are data curated?
 How are data formats managed over time?
 How is data movement different from data communications?
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What does this mean for IT?
 Deep collaboration between IT and other disciplines
 New needs
 Innovation in development, management and documentation of scientific
workflows
 Innovation in data curation and stewardship
 Institutional basis for multidisciplinary research
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What does this mean for innovation?
 Definitions
 Innovations are new creations of economic and societal significance, primarily
carried out by firms
 Innovation is the translation of the outcomes of R&D into practice
 The emerging research model described above shows that IT plays a
special role
 Innovation through IT
 Innovation of IT
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Supporting scientific
workflows
 Focus areas
 Improving efficiency of scientific processes
 Reducing transaction costs of
collaboration
 Developing new research methods
 Support scientific integrity and
accountability
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Examples of innovation through IT
 Workflow layer
 Support collaboration (e.g. information and project management)
 Develop applications (e.g. data analysis & visualization)
 Build toolsets (e.g. simulation software)
 Support layer
 Digital library repositories
 Accessibility, provenance and access control
 Infrastructure layer
 Reliable data repositories
 Data movement
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How has IT changed innovation?
 Process
 Business and research processes
(e.g., ERP systems)
 Operational models facilitated by
IT (Uber, AirBNB)
 Service
 On-demand services (e.g. SaaS)
 Applications
 Social networks
 MMP gaming
 Systems
 Computing clouds
 Mobile networks
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What does this mean for innovation
policy?
Innovation process
Implications
 Actors
 IT at each innovation layer must be
included
 Institutions
 Support for multidisciplinary
researchers
 Collaboration support
 Ideas
 Scientific innovation
 Structures
 IT infrastructure
IT innovation
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Summary
 Many countries use various policy instruments to stimulate innovation
 A substantial literature exists that studies innovation and innovation policy
 It is useful to think in terms of a policy mix rather than a singular innovation
policy
 Advances in information technology have stimulated profound changes
 In the scientific innovation processes
 In innovation in general
 A profound synergy exists between innovations in information technology
and the innovations made possible by the application of IT
 Thus, innovation policy must explicitly incorporate IT broadly into the
innovation ecosystem