Exploring linkages between innovation and public policy - Challenges and opportunities

Abstract

Significant research has gone into the analysis of the complex linkages between public policy and innovation. While this research has generated a lot of interesting insights, it has also identified several gaps in our understanding of these linkages. This paper is an attempt to pool together some of the ideas that academic research has highlighted on the linkages between innovation and public policy and identify the current challenges as well as opportunities for meaningfully exploring these linkages further. Through a select review of the literature the paper (i) provides a broad overview of the public policy–innovation interface; (ii) discusses issues of conceptualizing and measuring innovation, innovation related activities and policy changes; (iii) summarizes mechanisms through which various policies impact innovation along with available evidence on the same; and (iv) identifies challenges in exploring policy-innovation interface along with a few potential areas of research in the context of India.