Standard Research Grant: A Comparative Study of Three Models of Innovation in Their Transnational Implementation

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General Audience Summary This project studies the practice turn in innovation policy by comparing the adoption of three best-practice models of innovation in four cities: Bangalore (India), Boston (USA), Cambridge (UK), Karlsruhe (Germany). The models in question are the MIT model, the Silicon Valley model, and the Public Engagement model. Each research site is regarded as a motor of innovation in its nation and each is a site where at least two of the models have been implemented. Informed by STS insights about the limits of standardizing, packaging, or universalizing social practices, the study asks what is at stake when social welfare is recast in terms of innovation policy and best practice transfer. The proposal uses qualitative STS research methods and focuses on the biotechnology and IT sectors for empirical analysis. The results of this study will have a direct impact on policy-practitioners (such as government officials, institutional managers, and consultants), who increasingly turn to plugin-type policy solutions but lack the analytic tools to theorize, evaluate, and coordinate these attempts. The study will explicate the assumptions and implications of using best practice transfer to promote social welfare and seek avenues to re-democratize technocratic approaches to innovation policy. It will sustain close interaction with the practitioners interviewed, and aims to amplify a critical public discourse on how the social welfare functions of the state are being redefined and redirected through innovation policy. Through a transnational network of researchers, it will extend to additional regions, thus generalizing the research beyond the four selected sites and three models. The project will provide education and training at the nexus of STS and innovation policy analysis.Technical Summary This project explores how countries imagine their sociotechnical futures through the practice turn in innovation policy. This turn entails a three-fold shift in the use of innovation policy as an answer to basic socioeconomic challenges confronting 21st-century nations and a touchstone for governmental legitimacy, as a category that sees innovation as desirable and achievable through standardized practices; and as a benchmark activity preferably implemented through best-practice transfer. The study will illuminate the tacit assumptions, implementation experiences, institutional transformations, and broader social impacts of best practices transfer efforts. More specifically, it will address how each of the three best-practice models were systematized sufficiently to have global influence, how have policymakers interpreted these models and the underlying assumptions made in doing so, how the models are being locally implemented, how their performance have been assessed, how their circulation feed back into the redefinition of each, and the policy lessons of their circulation. The project lays the foundation for an innovation theory that accounts for the practice turn and best practice transfer as a de-facto mode of operation of policy actors. It will build upon and go beyond the dominant analytic frameworks of pipelines and systems of innovation, and it will extend prior STS efforts on responsible innovation and anticipatory governance by paying particular attention to the implications for democratic values such as equality, participation, and access to the fruits of innovation.