Supporting Frontier Research, Which Institutions and Which Processes: Some Initial Considerations

International audienceThe chapter deals with ‘frontier research’ as a concept to organise public intervention in science and questions the choices made in Europe with the creation of a specific agency, the European Research Council. It shows how politically driven the emergence of the concept was both in the US and in Europe. It presents the very different organisational choices that have been made in Europe and in the US, but also within the US. This drives to analyse Frontier research through two lenses: as a process highlighting organisational implications, and as part of knowledge dynamics highlighting the need for keeping the link with substantive aspects and thus the need for cognitive specificity. These lenses are then applied to look at the ERC trying to address three questions: does the process selected will produce ‘excellent’ rather than ‘frontier’ science? Will it help addressing the perceived ‘quantitative’ gap in frontier science between the US and Europe? Will it be able to cope with diversity in knowledge dynamics? The answers are not straightforward and drive to suggest an evolution of the ERC being not only one more agency among the existing funding agencies in Europe, but also the ‘agency of agencies’ to be in a position to focus on ‘scientific grand challenges’

A Framework for Policy Oriented Innovation Studies in Industrialising Countries

This paper argues that there is increasing need for the integration of policy considerations in the formulation of research questions and in the development of analytical work in policy oriented innovation studies. Despite the fact that Evolutionary and Innovation Studies theories have offered new ways of incorporating policy, little explicitness in this regard has yet been achieved and there is a risk that academic research following the new perspectives will be of little relevance for policy. Rather than a 'linear process' starting with empirical research aimed at linking competitiveness and economic performance to technological capabilities (in a comparative perspective and aimed at identifying 'best practice') followed by very abstract and un-grounded 'policy implications' - a new type of link between positive and normative economics in the field is required. Our approach suggests a new structure for policy-oriented and policy-relevant research, i.e. the integration of research on technological change and industrial transformation with research on policy and the development of a conceptual framework for the design and implementation of innovation policies.Innovation Policy, Industrialising Countries, Technology Policy, Industrial Policy,