The main question that guides this paper is how governments are focusing (and
must focus) on competence building (education and training) when designing and
implementing innovation policies. With this approach, the paper aims at filling the
gap between the existing literature on competences on the one hand, and the real
world of innovation policy-making on the other, typically not speaking to each other.
With this purpose in mind, this paper discusses the role of competences and
competence-building in the innovation process from a perspective of innovation
systems; it examines how governments and public agencies in different countries
and different times have actually approached the issue of building, maintaining and
using competences in their innovation systems; it examines what are the critical and
most important issues at stake from the point of view of innovation policy, looking
particularly at the unresolved tensions and systemic unbalances related to
competences in the system; and last but not least, it elaborates a set of overall
criteria for the selection and design of relevant policy instruments addressing those
tensions and unbalances
