18, February 2026

In 2026 THECIS celebrates its 25th anniversary. To celebrate this, we are starting a 25th Anniversary Blog series where we ask prominent individuals to write a blog to provide perspective on a topic related to innovation and entrepreneurship. This Blog is by Richard Hawkins, former Professor and Canada Research Chair in Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy at the University of Calgary. It is the third in a three-part series on the past, present and future of innovation policy.

The Future of Innovation Policy – Blog 101

Projecting the future of innovation policy is fraught with pitfalls. Moreover, given the broadening scope of reservations about past practice that have accumulated in recent years, the task now goes well beyond simply assessing the performance of existing policies in efforts improve them. That goes on, as it always has. But there is now a much greater imperative to shift the innovation policy debate towards a fundamental re-examination of the social and economic assumptions and “contracts” that have grown up alongside that enterprise.

Even as regards the efficacy and efficiency of existing policy actions in achieving their own stated goals, the picture has always been mixed. Questions have always been raised as to the extent that advances in technology are the product of public policy. Depending largely on where you focus, there are strong arguments both for and against.

The debate has been clarified to some extent by several large-scale meta-studies of applied innovation policy drawn from program evaluations and impact assessments carried out by governments, NGOs, supplemented by analytical studies of the links between specific policy inputs and outcomes like growth and productivity. It would be impossible to reflect the complexity of their findings here, but we can extrapolate some broad observations that may at least begin to outline the bigger picture.

With a few notable exceptions, most of the actions familiar to us have indeed yielded impacts in varying degrees, but always highly contingent on the specific context, location, and timing of the initiatives, and upon the appropriate “mix” and “churn” of measures employed. In other words, many currently applied measures can work to limited extents, but none work at all in isolation, and no one approach or mix of approaches is ever appropriate to every situation, especially over time.

All of which rather scuppers any notion that simply activating these measures, much less relying repeatedly on just a few selected measures, will lead efficiently to more innovation. Furthermore, in terms of effects on growth and productivity, these measures may generate more fire than heat. A fresh new avenue of analysis pioneered by recent Nobel Laureate Daron Acemoglu and his colleagues has suggested that the mostly indiscriminate way that growth in the supply of new technology has been encouraged has resulted merely in oversupply of what they call “so-so technologies”; items that burn up a lot of development resources but yield little or no positive impact on productivity, employment or growth.

Most significantly for the future of innovation policy, the most consistently successful and impactful measures over the longer term appear to have been those situated at macro and meso levels. Most of these fall within the core remits of government – rule making, regulation and standards, infrastructure provision, public procurement, social and economic coordination and cohesion, education, basic science, defence and health among others – any of which can be focused also on the goal of stimulating innovation. This observation holds also when spaced out on a continuum from most to least successful in terms of impacts on productivity and growth.

Admittedly, my thumbnail extrapolation is not conclusive. But it does indicate that in terms of planning a future for innovation policy, we seem to have come full circle to where, how, and why innovation policy emerged in the first place. Or maybe we were always there. Except that fueled by enthusiasm, optimism, and fear of falling behind we lost sight of where the most critical governance priorities always lie, whether for innovation or anything else.

Indeed, we might say that today’s policy task is now the exact opposite of the reconstruction era task – not so much to build up the global industrial infrastructure, but to keep it from disintegrating. Except that the social and economic conditions we face today are completely different and challenging in the extreme.

All policy actions pursued to date, whether at macro, meso or micro levels, have been undertaken in a highly supportive environment of steady globalization, liberalizing trade, uninhibited scientific enquiry, and a generally accepting social environment highly conducive to the development of technology markets. We are now entering an era when these conditions are under severe pressure, even threat. In today’s uncertain environment, the future of innovation policy cannot be contemplated apart from the future of policy for these nurturing environments.

For the present, however, we can observe that few if any of the conventional policy rationales appear to be on their way out. “Tech for tech’s sake” remains a powerful policy mantra. If we look at the recent Canadian federal budget, for example, the measures for innovation are basically the same familiar thicket of R&D tax credits and research talent importation that successive governments have been relying upon for the past 30 years. But even in the EU, the Draghi Report, with all its emphasis on radical economic and security reforms, does not venture all that far from conventional actions on the science and technology front. Change will be a long haul.

The principal challenge for policy makers today is indeed to innovate; to leap beyond convention and to implement more comprehensive and holistic strategies for innovation that are driven by a much wider and more sophisticated range of evidence and analysis that is rooted in a much more nuanced perception of what constitutes the public interest.

We can already see an image of how this might coalesce reflected in a range of alternative conceptual models. Some – like “mission strategies,” “new industrial policy” and “industrial ecosystems” harken back to the earliest origins of innovation policy. Various “transition strategies,” motivated largely by environmental concerns, pursue approaches that link up technological development with the transformation of keystone technological and social infrastructures. Still others focus on new forms of interactive governance, often utilizing collaborative mechanisms like living labs, and citizen science that bring as many civil society stakeholders as possible into the policy arena. Initiatives like these also tend to be much better informed by a significantly broader evidential base than those of conventional approaches, and to encourage fresh and rigorous new analytical methods.

Out of these and many other innovative policy models, we can even begin to discern some new basic principles for guiding future policy. First, there is an emerging preference for policy to do more than simply encourage the production of technology, instead targeting resources at achieving specific outcomes. Second, there is a trend to embed innovation policy in other policy domains, and to focus on building industries rather than just supporting or subsidizing firms. This most evident right now with defence and security. And third, amidst rising public concerns about the social and personal perils of technology, there is a new imperative to re-imagine approaches to regulation and rulemaking.

In these uncertain times, just how these and many other currents may eventually coalesce into a coherent new framework for innovation policy, or even if they will, is still a matter for conjecture. Given the extreme, unprecedented, and even existential challenges we are facing today all that seems certain is that, somehow, they must.

Richard Hawkins, former Professor and Canada Research Chair in Science, Technology and Innovation Policy at the University of Calgary.