Government-directed innovation is empty promises – more resources are spent on marketing and resources are misallocated to consultants

There seems to be no limit to what policymakers and pundits expect that innovation can achieve. Above and beyond renewal and economic development on long term, innovation is today a “panacea” (Godin 2012: 37; Pfotenhauer and Jasanoff 2017: 784), generally viewed as an “institutional and individual road to salvation” (Brattström and Wennberg 2022), and the “ultimate solution to present welfare related problems in the West” (Gripenberg et al. 2012: 1). Innovation has therefore become “a policy obsession” (Pfotenhauer 2019: 191), and its alleged importance is treated as an axiom for policymaking (Sveiby et al. 2012b: 250). In many of the resulting policies and investments, innovation has ceased to be something real, that contributes to society and the economy by making substantial improvements to life in various respects, and has instead become the theme of a new “worldview or belief system” shared by policymakers, bureaucrats, communication officers, consultants, and even academics. The result is the spread of “innovationism”, an “invisible and naturalized” ideology, and an “accepted, self-evident, future-oriented-and collective-way of imagining a better future” (Valaskivì 2012: 150). Similarly, entrepreneurship has “become a mantra that has worked, paradoxically, by repetition”, with the same platitudes repeated by business gurus and “echoed by politicians seeking economic cures” (Jones and Spicer 2009: 2).

The result is, sadly, an abundance of misplaced initiatives and empty talk. For example, the European Union’s 2000 Lisbon strategy stated that the EU was to become “the most competitive and dynamic knowledge- based economy in the world” by 2010 (European Union 2000). Commentators have noted that the strategy was built on unrealistic promises and a deficient understanding of how regions and nations develop, and that its layout was aimed at meeting specific targets defined in a number of shallow indicators, rather than working purposefully to achieve real change and progress (Tausch 2010; James 2012). This notwithstanding, the EU has moved on from the Lisbon Strategy to even more ambitious programs, like Europe 2020, which appears as something of an invasive innovation policy framework program that takes over the agenda and subsumes other (important) policy areas like research policy, education policy, environmental policy, and industrial policy under its aims (Nauwelaers and Wintjes 2008: 286; Flanagan et al. 2011: 703; Lagendijk and Varró 2013: 115). National equivalents are just as grandiose, and just as superficial. In 2012, for example, the Swedish government launched its “innovation strategy” with the purpose to “contribute to a climate with the best possible conditions for innovation in Sweden with year 2020 in sight” (Swedish Government 2012). But although thousands of representatives from academia, industry, and government reportedly were invited to chip in, the strategy itself is “pretty thin and diluted” (Hall and Löfgren 2017: 311). Similar “innovation strategies”, containing mostly empty phrases with little or no connection to any real innovative capacity or effort, exist in many countries and on several levels of government (Pfotenhauer et al. 2019: 895; Pfotenhauer and Jasanoff 2017: 784). In order to back up these strategies with practical and concrete action, in most countries, specifically designated and considerably sizable innovation agencies have been set up with the mission of distributing public funding for innovation and keeping track of innovation policy and execution, which usually means producing reports, brochures and marketing slogans.

But the governmental obsession with innovation and pursuit of unrealistic expectations and promises of sustainable economic growth is not restricted to hot air and glossy brochures. The cross-disciplinary field of innovation studies, usually lacking a critical perspective and sometimes very difficult to distinguish from governmental or corporate branding efforts, has boomed and now has a home in academic research units in most universities. In the borderland between academia, business consultancy, and public administration reside a seemingly self-sustaining class of “innovation experts”, occupied with formulating, executing, and evaluating innovation policies and innovation-promoting initiatives with doubtful real significance for the economy or broader society, but nonetheless funded with millions of Euros and dollars every year (Wisnioski 2019). Their activities extend to various innovation events, where innovation experts hold workshops and mingle with entrepreneurs, academics, elected officials, and public servants under visionary slogans and imaginative rhetoric, as well as massive wasteful spending on whatever new technology or imaginative future model for the sustainable organizing of local and global society. The purpose of “innovation events” where “canonized preachers profess their faith” (Valaskivì 2012: 150) is quite clearly not to innovate— the absence of any hands-on activities at such gatherings is conspicuous— but to provide opportunities for “a form of collective endorsement of belief” in innovation (Andersson Cederholm and Hall 2020: 1416). Such events form a key ingredient in the maintenance of a collective identity among the many consultants, academics, politicians, bureaucrats, and corporate actors that make up the innovation elites who live off the promise that the innovation obsession entails, that these elites actually can contribute to economic development (Hall and Löfgren 2017: 314).

It doesn’t stop there. The innovation elites also make concrete efforts toward such assumed contributions, pouring hundreds of millions of Euros into gargantuan programs to stimulate R&D and industrial development both in very practical and hands-on areas like hydrogen fuel cells and efficient batteries, and concerning more visionary and vaguely defined things like the “circular economy” and the “energy transition” (Amenta and Stagnaro 2022: 247), aiming to turn costs into investments and achieve growth, innovation, job creation as part of the task to save the planet. Similarly, an “entrepreneurship industry” has been built up, consisting of a heterogeneous set of actors and organizations that produce and market “goods and services explicitly intended for opportunity discovery and development by current and prospective entrepreneurs” (Hunt and Kiefer 2017: 231). Entrepreneurship education programs are commonplace at universities and colleges today, embedded in a variety of institutional arrangements that are said to stimulate innovation and make entrepreneurs out of both students and teachers. Governments and their agencies award massive amounts of money in prices and grants to prospective entrepreneurs and innovations. Inside companies, corporate venturing activities such as innovation labs, incubators, venture capital, and innovation outposts are mobilized to make the organizations more innovative. While estimated to have a volume of tens of billions annually just in the United States, the “entrepreneurship industry” is not conducive of entrepreneurial success and innovation: It has been shown that consumption of the products and services of the entrepreneurship industry lowers both entrepreneurial performance and chances for businesses to survive in the long run (Hunt and Kiefer 2017). The result is therefore more of an “untrepreneurial economy”, meaning an economy “in which extensive efforts and resources are invested in entrepreneurial activities that appear to be innovative and economically valuable, but lack the substance to contribute meaningfully to economic growth” (Hartmann et al. 2020: 881).