In the year 2000, in Lisbon, the European Union launched an agenda for growth, jobs, sustainability and competiveness with a ten-year target. In 2010, the agenda was re-launched with different specific objectives but with the same final goals. Why do the European Union leaders engage with these ten-year plans? What exactly do they commit to when they do so? Do they learn from the results, or is this a rhetorical exercise that complex organizations need to raise attention to certain issues?

This volume is the first-ever systematic study of the Lisbon agenda of the European Union, now called Europe 2020. It explains the rise of the Lisbon agenda as governance architectures and examines its components across time and sectors.

This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of European Public Policy.

This title was first published in 2003.During the 1990s research and technological development policies moved from a 'problem-solving' approach towards a wider one focusing on the systemic nature of the innovation process. This change can be featured as the transition from a technology policy towards an innovation policy. 'Innovation Policies in Europe and the US: The New Agenda' provides a comparative analysis of eleven highly industrialized countries' innovation policies in the 1990s, and addresses the nature, dynamics, causes and effects of this transition. By combining the analytical skills of sociologists, economists and political scientists the book sets up a novel framework for studying the evolution of this particular policy area by examining institutional change from a broader perspective.

This title was first published in 2003.During the 1990s research and technological development policies moved from a 'problem-solving' approach towards a wider one focusing on the systemic nature of the innovation process. This change can be featured as the transition from a technology policy towards an innovation policy. 'Innovation Policies in Europe and the US: The New Agenda' provides a comparative analysis of eleven highly industrialized countries' innovation policies in the 1990s, and addresses the nature, dynamics, causes and effects of this transition. By combining the analytical skills of sociologists, economists and political scientists the book sets up a novel framework for studying the evolution of this particular policy area by examining institutional change from a broader perspective.

How do countries create and replicate socio-economic success? This book argues that success comes from how people make sense of their institutions when they are placed under stress. When institutional frameworks are challenged, a range of agents engaged in sensemaking processes that invoke certain identities on 'who we are', contain normative claims about 'how things should be', and involve strategies on 'how to get there'. Sensemaking about the future and the past is crucial to institutional competitiveness and includes prospective and retrospective points of departure, as well as focusing on developing abstract causes of change or replicating success from previous experience. This book brings together a range of world-class scholars from Comparative Political Economy, Institutional Theory, and Organizational Sociology to discuss how sensemaking processes create institutional change. The contributors investigate a range of cases that cover different institutions linked to competitiveness, including labour, public management, think tanks, firms, innovation policies, tax and housing policies, and welfare systems. With a strong focus on the Nordic experience and comparisons with advanced industrialized economies, this volume provides an innovative and original framework for understanding institutional change.

Holistic Innovation Policy puts forward a novel framework for the design and analysis of innovation policy. It provides a theoretically anchored foundation for the design of holistic innovation policy by identifying the core problems that tend to afflict innovations and the activities of innovation systems, including the unintended consequences of policy itself. As most of the current innovation policies focus on few determinants of innovation processes, this is a necessary stepping stone for the identification of viable, relevant, and down-to-earth policy solutions. Rather than presenting a recipe or 'how-to' guide, this book offers a critical analysis of policy instruments and their choice in innovation policy design, and considers the ways in which policy might be providing solutions to problems in systems of innovation. Exploring areas such as knowledge production and R&D, education, training and skills development, demand-side activities, interaction and innovation networks, changing institutions and regulations, and the public financing of early stage innovations, its critical and novel perspective serves policy-makers, scholars, and those interested in the design of innovation policy.