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

本项目通过比较四个城市（印度班加罗尔、美国波士顿、英国剑桥、德国卡尔斯鲁厄）对三种最佳创新实践模式的采用，研究创新政策的实践转向。我们讨论的模式是麻省理工学院模式、硅谷模式和公众参与模式。每个研究基地都被视为本国创新的发动机，而且每个基地都至少实施了两种模式。根据STS关于标准化、包装或普及社会实践的局限性的见解，该研究询问了在创新政策和最佳实践转移方面重塑社会福利时，什么是利害攸关的。本文采用定性STS研究方法，并以生物技术和信息技术行业为研究对象进行实证分析。这项研究的结果将对政策实践者（如政府官员、机构管理者和顾问）产生直接影响，他们越来越多地转向插件式政策解决方案，但缺乏分析工具来理论化、评估和协调这些尝试。该研究将阐明使用最佳实践转移来促进社会福利的假设和影响，并寻求使技术官僚方法重新民主化的创新政策途径。它将与受访的从业人员保持密切互动，旨在扩大关于国家社会福利功能如何通过创新政策被重新定义和重新定向的关键公共话语。通过研究人员的跨国网络，它将扩展到其他地区，从而将研究推广到四个选定地点和三种模式之外。该项目将在STS和创新政策分析的联系方面提供教育和培训。本项目探讨各国如何通过创新政策的实践转变设想其社会技术的未来。这一转变需要在使用创新政策方面进行三重转变，将其作为21世纪国家面临的基本社会经济挑战的答案，并作为政府合法性的试金石，作为一个将创新视为可取和可通过标准化实践实现的类别；作为基准活动，最好通过最佳实践转移来实现。该研究将阐明最佳实践转移工作的隐性假设、实施经验、制度转变和更广泛的社会影响。更具体地说，它将讨论三个最佳实践模型如何充分系统化以产生全球影响，政策制定者如何解释这些模型以及在此过程中作出的基本假设，如何在当地实施这些模型，如何评估它们的表现，它们的循环如何反馈到对每个模型的重新定义，以及它们的循环的政策教训。该项目为创新理论奠定了基础，该理论将实践转向和最佳实践转移作为政策行为者事实上的运作模式。它将建立并超越创新管道和系统的主要分析框架，它将通过特别关注对平等、参与和获得创新成果等民主价值的影响，扩展STS先前在负责任的创新和预期治理方面的努力。

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.