This chapter examines how missions can better engage the private sector and other stakeholders, moving beyond their role as co-ordination platforms for public authorities. This has become increasingly critical as missions progress toward deployment. It highlights barriers to private sector involvement, such as complexity, long time horizons, a lack of clear incentives or resistance from incumbents, and stresses the need for clearer communication, shared ownership and stronger business cases. It reviews effective design processes and policy tools to crowd in private sector resources and align them with mission goals: early stakeholder involvement, mission communities, bridging organisations, tailored incentives, procurement and long-term commitments.
Forging New Frontiers in Mission‑Oriented Innovation Policies
Abstract
As missions mature, their focus moves from co-ordination and agenda-setting to deploying solutions at scale. This requires stronger private sector involvement beyond initial consultation.
Many missions struggle to attract sustained industry participation due to long time horizons, complex funding instruments, small budgets, unclear market opportunities, and resistance from incumbents whose business models and established positions may be threatened.
Early efforts to create and strengthen “mission communities” and mission ecosystems can foster ownership. Various types of intermediaries such as clusters, industry associations, or research and technology organisations (RTOs) can be instrumental to achieve this, mobilising firms, connecting missions to needs and helping co-ordinate systemic changes.
To engage private sector actors, missions must continuously and very early test the appetite of firms through calls for interest, co-design processes and continuous feedback loops.
Private actors need credible signals that missions are durable and not subject to political cycles. Mechanisms include dedicated multi-year budgets, legislation, sectoral funding agreements and institutionalised governance structures.
Missions should broaden their funding tools beyond traditional research and development (R&D) grants, experimenting with blended finance, equity, stage-gated funding and especially demand-side tools like public procurement for innovation to create markets and derisk private investment.
Legitimacy requires involving citizens, non-governmental organisations and civil society in defining and implementing missions. Participation must be meaningful, not symbolic, with resources for smaller actors.
In their early years, missions put much emphasis on developing their objectives and strategic agendas, convening different public authorities across silos, and building adequate governance that allows aligning their plans and interventions. Against this backdrop, missions remain, in many cases, public authorities’ co‑ordination platforms, but the way private sector actors are involved remains traditional in most cases.
As many missions are maturing, their focus is moving toward deployment, scaling-up and crowding in investment from outside of government – activities that require more buy-in from the private sector. In addition, while it is not the primary goal of mission-oriented innovation policies (MOIPs), strengthening national competitiveness and creating new jobs almost always feature among the missions’ objectives, if only informally (OECD, 2024[1]). This often appears in the metrics governments use to monitor and evaluate these programmes (e.g. patents or new spin-offs).
The main challenge relates to the different ways to engage the private sector in missions with a view to attract investment and/or deploy new solutions at scale.
The proposed main questions this chapter addresses are:
What factors deter private sector actors and stakeholders from becoming involved in missions?
What are the drivers of private sector engagement in missions?
What mission design and consultation processes are the most effective in attracting private sector engagement?
What type of policies and incentives are most effective in attracting private sector investment in the missions?
How can societal, non-profit and other stakeholders’ buy-in to the mission objectives be increased?
Stakeholder involvement is, in principle, integral to each dimension of MOIPs:
strategic orientation: stakeholders help frame the mission, and their engagement at this early stage builds their buy-in so they will help address the missions
policy co-ordination: bridging organisations help co-ordinate private sector commitments towards missions
policy implementation: stakeholders participate in projects related to the missions, helping to solve the missions by developing new ideas then co-investing to deploy these solutions at scale.
However, stakeholder involvement is lacking in many missions – particularly when it comes to the private sector. It proves difficult to reach a broad range of stakeholders who are actively interested in contributing to the mission design and, even more so, implementation. The level and nature of this engagement partly depend on the challenge a mission is trying to address.
The role, mandate and tasks in integrating the private sector can be further sharpened to better align mutual expectations in advance and avoid misunderstandings.
– Germany’s Future Research and Innovation Strategy, conference poster
Societal and transformative missions
Many mission goals fall under areas with a more considerable role for the public sector and where the private sector is not always seen to play as much of a leading role (e.g. issues regarding healthcare or public transportation). These mission areas often still require new innovations to be developed and deployed by the private sector, but many levers to address them require broader behavioural or regulatory changes, or at the very least public procurement, where the private sector has less influence.
There are tipping points towards crowding in, where you need to get enough interest to then scale up and reach impact. That initial interest building is the hardest.
– Mission manager
In addition, due to the transformative nature of some missions, some segments of the private sector will oppose or seek to frustrate the outcome because it will negatively affect their existing business models. In other missions, it is the leading companies in the mission area who choose to not be involved in the missions so they can preserve their advantage. These social intricacies and contestations are some of the main issues preventing ambitious and abrupt transformations (Laatsit, Grillitsch and Fünfschilling, 2025[2]). Missions must try to tell stories in two languages to ensure they can create more buy‑in across different stakeholder groups. While a mission’s overarching goal is to address a societal problem, policymakers need to continue to reinforce the market-creation and business case logic. These stories need to reinforce each other. At the same time, governments must ensure there are proper checks and balances to prevent private sector actors from biasing missions towards their own goals too much. The state must act as a referee in this regard – balancing transformation with the generation of sufficient buy-in.
Too much complexity, not enough funding
Language is a problem – our language is too technocratic to attract companies in missions.
– Mission manager
Some private sector actors find participating in missions more complex and time-consuming than other types of government programming. This complexity is in part due to the longer time horizon of missions and the conditions attached to instruments. The lack of funding commensurate to the level of ambition also deters participation, or at least does not compensate for some of the higher transaction costs. This is particularly true for large systemic missions, but less so for more focused challenge-based schemes such as the Norwegian Pilot E.1 “Missions” as a concept is also not easily understood by the private sector, so some initiatives have even established communications strategies to help stakeholders understand what missions are and how they can be involved (e.g. the Wallonia Smart Specialisation Strategy includes good communication as a key governance principle, actively sharing progress on the missions through regular reports, meetings and a LinkedIn group). On the other hand, sometimes policymakers do not speak the same language as industry leaders in charge of individual missions and thus struggle to respond to their needs.
The TRAMI project conducted a survey of actors involved in missions. The results showed modest interest of the private sector in missions due to the comparatively longer time horizon at which missions operate, the rather complex funding instruments competing for partners and beneficiaries with simpler alternatives, and the rather modest engagement of the missions with industrial stakeholders.
TRAMI also found that countries like the Netherlands (Mission-Driven Innovation Policy) seem to fare better in that regard. Positive drivers of industrial engagement are reported to be the role of agencies or industry-driven networks, which try to ensure that missions are well linked to industrial needs and interest.
Source: Nylander, Polt and Weber (2024[3]).
Engaging stakeholders broadly and early in the mission process
Engaging stakeholders broadly and early allows missions to build buy-in from stakeholders. Defining the mission can take several stages, and the types of stakeholders in the room will change from stage to stage. For instance, initial work during the mission framing stage could focus on what issues matter the most to citizens, in which case focusing on engaging members from civil society may be more appropriate. When it comes to identifying solutions to these problems, the users and those affected by the problem may still be involved, but so should the government and private sector leaders who can create change (see Box 4.2 for examples of how Vinnova and the RIS3CAT missions have done this).
Engage these players in defining specific targets. Previous missions were formulated only by experts from the science and innovation community, but this led to a certain disconnect with what industry partners want and deem realistic.
– Mission manager
Starting to establish a common understanding of the problem, its boundaries and broad direction (and common language as mentioned above) as early as the framing stage is key for aligning expectations towards the initiative and building buy-in for later. At the same time, missions should not be too prescriptive and allow for some leeway to address the missions through different solutions, which in turn can accommodate a broader range of private sector and non-profit actors’ competences.
Building new forms of public-private partnerships to create a sense of “mission community”
In some cases, notably the ecosystem-based missions, these communities are formalised through mission partnerships. The “Nordic mission model” described above (e.g. with Denmark’s Innomissions and Sweden’s SIPs) involves the government often identifying broad challenge areas then issuing a call for proposals from consortia representing the ecosystem on how they will address the challenges. The Innomissions and SIPs have nominal fees where members pay to take part in the consortia. Non-members can sometimes take part in projects but only members inform the direction of the overall mission partnerships. While this ecosystem model creates buy-in from those involved in the consortia for the scoping exercises, this often also requires a new set of skills (e.g. for developing theories of change or reviewing proposals), which can present new barriers without the right training and support from government. Sweden has developed the Impact Accelerator to help with these challenges in the Impact Innovation initiative. The accelerator will be an arena to foster knowledge exchange between the programmes and help educate the programmes on a “mission-driven way of working”. While the Danish Innomissions have been delegated almost complete authority in taking funding decisions, this was a gradual evolution, and the Danish government has provided support to help them develop the capacities they need to take over this role. Also, the Swedish SIPs2 engaged industry at their core, involving them, for instance, in the programme offices. However, this can limit their transformative impact, as revealed by the evaluations of the scheme. At the same time, companies’ engagement with the SIPs increased over time as they gained confidence in the programmes to deliver on their missions, and the market opportunities became more apparent (Aström, Arnold and Olsson, 2021[4]).
An interesting model for engaging companies is the Finnish Challenge Competition for Leading Companies initiative, where Business Finland provides significant funding to selected large companies with global operations. In return, the companies commit to invest their R&D expenditure in national challenges (for instance in the development of a sustainable food sector) and strengthen and mobilise ecosystems in tackling this challenge. The two pillars of this unique model are large company leadership and cascading effects on surrounding ecosystem actors.
These approaches based on partnerships do more than just leverage complementarities and foster science-industry and pre-competitive co-operation within ecosystems: they gradually grow a sense of community and the acknowledgement of a common fate in the face of economic and social challenges. This is a condition for collective action. The co-creation of the mission strategic agenda, the involvement of all actors in its governance, and the support of a permanent mission secretariat or office with experienced staff are key to their success.
Investing time and resources in private sector engagement
Policymakers alone cannot identify strong candidates to be missions – it requires long‑term strategic foresight, dialogue and building stakeholders’ trust.
– Finland’s Flagship Programme, conference poster
Almost all missions use workshops or roundtables to engage the relevant stakeholders. Several countries use strategic intelligence like foresight or big data analytics to complement these discussions. Business Finland, for instance, used strategic foresight (scanning, scouting and scenario work) to identify the thematic interests of the companies, which complements other engagement. Business Finland’s mission topics are selected in areas that offer significant future market opportunities for Finnish companies.3 In Australia, CSIRO’s missions engaged with large multinational enterprises, using the foresight work it had done on technology trends to partially inform its mission goals.
Industry needs to be involved in the framing from the beginning if we want to engage them. Make sure that the top down meets the bottom up!
– Mission manager
The mission definition stage should be used also to test the different actors’ appetite. Some countries have issued calls for expression of interest, without guaranteeing funding, to understand what companies are interested in taking part in the missions. Governments can use these early interactions to identify the willing, and potentially work with the companies to develop projects that will benefit the missions. Following this early engagement, missions without sufficient gravity to attract efforts and resources can be reframed, repositioned or abandoned. For example, the French Acceleration Strategies issued such a call to allow project leaders (industries, territories, research centres) to bring forward their projects and identify obstacles (technical, regulatory, financial). In the UKRI Challenge Fund, the UK government requires a large amount of matched funding for each of its challenges. To ensure there is sufficient demand from businesses for challenges, they are asked to submit their intentions before the objectives are set. The challenge directors conduct continuous engagement to attract further interest from relevant stakeholders. Overall, the government has invested GBP 2.6 billion in the Challenge Fund, and this has been matched by GBP 3 billion from the private sector.
Ultimately, as mentioned in Chapter 2, the design and consultation process should not be rushed. While there is often political pressure to set mission goals and start programming, engaging actors in the early stages, ensuring they see themselves in the missions, is critical in building longer term commitment.
Vinnova “pilot missions”
Vinnova launched two experimental missions focused on promoting healthy and sustainable mobility and food.1 These missions aimed not only to develop solutions but also to refine the processes for implementing them within the agency. A key aspect was co-design, engaging stakeholders throughout the mission’s development.
After exploring nine potential mission themes through events and workshops, Vinnova narrowed the focus down to two strategic areas: 1) healthy and sustainable mobility; and 2) food. The emphasis on both “health” and “sustainability” ensured multidisciplinary, impactful societal outcomes.
A co-design process involving diverse stakeholders identified key leverage points within these systems. Vinnova’s team refined these insights, auditing existing initiatives and exploring new actions, eventually leading to two pilot missions, one for each theme. Mission statements and a theory of change were developed to outline necessary actions and track progress toward the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. Further co-design work led to prototype projects for the pilot missions. The entire process were documented in a guidebook for future use.
RIS3CAT 2030
The Research and Innovation Strategy for the Smart Specialisation of Catalonia 2021-2030 (RIS3CAT 2030) aims to engage cross-sectoral regional stakeholders in transformative action, thereby accelerating the transition towards a green, digital, resilient and fair socio-economic model aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals.2 It does this through shared agendas, which mobilise an ecosystem of actors to address a common vision.
In all shared agendas, the first step is to identify a challenge and bring together a small group of actors committed to transformative change. They develop a shared vision of the future and of the current situation and establish priority action areas and a governance model. The shared agendas then co-design and test solutions for the priority action areas before scaling them up.
Notes: 1. See: https://stip.oecd.org/moip/case-studies/43 and 2. See: https://stip.oecd.org/moip/case-studies/41.
Sources: Hill (2022); Generalitat de Catalonia (2023; 2020).
Ongoing engagement with stakeholders
Engagement with the private sector is often stronger at the outset when it comes to the mission framing, but it might peter off when it comes to delivering due to co-ordination issues and requirements to invest their own money. As a result, new forms of collaboration and incentives may also be required to help deliver missions to attract continued stakeholder participation and investment.
After missions are established, stakeholder involvement in missions needs to be ongoing to ensure the mission remains a priority for the relevant actors who can help to achieve them. Many MOIPs have advisory boards (either at the level of the whole initiative and/or of missions), which provide opportunities for ongoing input and guidance from key stakeholder groups. Some MOIPs have these actors on their governing boards, which have more formal decision-making authorities over the direction of the missions. These approaches ensure the missions take into account a diverse set of perspectives from different stakeholders, and can further their buy-in. Circular Flanders has a governing body that represents what it calls the penta-helix – government, industry, research, civil society (including from the Association of Flemish Cities and Municipalities), and finance.
The work related to missions does not exist at one point in time. Mission owners need to be looking both forward (e.g. as new projects emerge) and backwards (e.g. revisiting past projects) to help build a portfolio of projects that adequately reflects the agreed-upon theory of change. The Dutch Top Sectors and Norway’s National Missions are using artificial intelligence to review past projects that may be related to their missions and then approaching relevant stakeholders. These exercises are helpful in identifying relevant stakeholders who could potentially take part in projects later in the process and understanding what avenues other projects have already explored. The European Commission performed its own “sense‑making” to understand past and present activities relevant to the Horizon Europe Missions. This portfolio analysis found 841 EU projects that contribute to the objectives of the ocean and waters missions, which are informing the mission activities.
In addition, some MOIPs have specific opportunities where additional stakeholders can learn about and join the missions. Early-stage research to develop novel technologies that address missions can sometimes be done through government research institutes or post-secondary institutions, but bringing these technologies to market and deploying them at scale may require more private sector engagement. Several countries have also established large-scale events or assemblies where those involved, or interested in getting involved, in the mission can contribute after the mission has launched. Norway’s National Missions and the United States’ Energy Earthshots have conferences/summits that bring together industry, researchers, government leaders and other relevant actors, including some marginally involved or at the periphery of these missions. This allows stakeholders to discuss the progress to date and the path forward, which also holds the initiatives to account. These events further facilitate the cross‑pollination of ideas beyond the regular mission activities. Czechia has regular information meetings about its missions, where funders provide information to new stakeholders interested in supporting the missions.
Engage stakeholders broadly and early to build buy-in from stakeholders around the missions.
Create a sense of mission community through the support to the formation of mission ecosystems
Test the appetite of the different relevant actors, who could form the “coalition of the willing” (e.g. calls for expression of interest), before launching missions.
Use a combination of engagement approaches that ensure the missions are linked to past projects, current strengths and future opportunities (e.g. artificial intelligence mapping of previously funded projects and foresight to identify future opportunities).
Include industry representatives on advisory boards to guide the missions and ensure they meet the needs of the private sector.
Provide training and government support for non-governmental stakeholders to enable a “mission way of working”.
Provide information and opportunities for stakeholders to learn and join the missions as the work towards the objectives progresses.
Leveraging “bridging” organisations
The changes required to meet mission goals are often systemic and require whole sectors or supply chains rather than individual organisations in silos to embrace the new solutions that are developed. As a result, some MOIPs work with bridging organisations (e.g. clusters, chambers of commerce or industry associations) at different stages of the mission life cycle. Engaging with industry does not always need to start from scratch as there are often existing bridging organisations that could be leveraged to support the missions. The Wallonia Smart Specialisation Strategy includes regional clusters in the co-ordination bodies for implementing its strategic innovation areas (its missions).4 Circular Flanders works with VLAIO, the Flemish Agency for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, to offer dedicated funding to the existing Spearhead Clusters for projects related to the circular economy. In addition, VLAIO and Circular Flanders screen the project portfolio of the clusters annually to highlight a number of “frontrunner projects”. These efforts have helped crowd-in more private sector investment into the circular economy.5
In other cases, there is not a clear link between a mission and established bridging organisations so the missions may support the development of new interlocutors. For instance, as part of the United Kingdom’s UKRI Challenge Fund, the government funded the establishment of the Construction Innovation Hub, which is helping to address the sector’s performance and productivity challenges, in support of a mission, by leading on several streams of work. This has created a new avenue for the government to reach out to businesses, but also for industry interests to plug into government decision making. In ecosystem-based missions, creating these new organisations is an integral part of setting mission priorities and governance. In some cases, consortia representing academia and the private sector help develop a pipeline of project proposals and even take part in the project selection processes (Box 4.4).
Missions often involve the private sector in their governance to ensure that they are responsive to the current state of the sector and that key actors are continuously engaged. The degree of authority devolved by the government to these non-governmental stakeholders falls along a spectrum of autonomy. Some governments use ecosystem actors to help develop a pipeline of projects to support the mission while others have provided consortia representing the innovation system with formal decision-making authorities. These approaches are captured by the following cases:
In the Netherland's Mission-Driven Innovation Policy, Top Consortia for Knowledge and Innovation (TKIs) provide a matchmaking role within their sectors to help develop consortia of partners to apply for funding opportunities that tackle aspects of the mission. While the government still makes the funding decisions, the TKIs help disseminate the results of these projects within their sectors.
With Sweden’s Strategic Innovation Partnership (SIPs) programmes, the SIPs develop the mission agenda, support the call for proposal and help develop a pipeline of projects. Applicants submit project proposals, which the innovation agency ranks for business and technical merit. The SIPs then select the projects to fund that rank above a certain threshold based on which ones best align with their broader objectives.
Denmark’s Innomissions have developed an even more decentralised model. This programme began by issuing a call for proposals from consortia to develop roadmaps that could address four mission areas. The Danish government then used these roadmaps to identify projects to fund. In the next stage of funding, like the Swedish SIPs, the Innomissions consortia provided input on which projects to support. The Danish government is now providing the consortia with almost autonomous control to issue calls for proposals, review the proposals and allocate funding – the government will just make a state aid check of the approved projects.
RTOs often play a positive role to help bridge missions to industrial partners and stakeholders (Larrue and Strauka, 2022). This role calls for new capabilities, such as the “convening capacity” (CSIRO, 2023[5]) or “orchestrating innovation” (TNO)6, in addition to new forms of technological knowledge and expertise. Evaluations of the Swedish SIPs provide evidence that RTOs have had significant systematic impacts, by gradually achieving a national joining of forces and mobilisation, both across traditional sectoral boundaries and along value chains. RTOs (notably the RISE institutes) have significantly contributed to this “by fulfilling a system integrating function, especially with regard to industry” (Aström, Arnold and Olsson, 2021[4]). There are many other examples of RTOs playing a key role in missions far beyond the sole provision of knowledge and technologies as a traditional partner, from the Austrian Institute of Technology in Austrian missions to Catapult in the United Kingdom’s Challenge Funds and the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission in the French Acceleration Strategies.
Providing certainty that missions will be long-term priorities
Private sector actors look for certainty in terms of government priorities to justify their investments. As many initiatives and priorities transform or disappear with a change in government, industry is often hesitant to make long-term investments in missions in the absence of a credible guarantee from public authorities. Both the private and public sectors seek some degree of certainty that missions will be long‑term priorities before committing their own resources. Providing confidence through reliable long-term public commitments to missions, regardless of political changes or sudden budgetary constraints, helps create confidence. This might involve some institutional innovations in many national systems since, despite pluriannual plans and announcements, budgets are still voted each year, with little legal obligations related to past year’s commitments.
To become more resilient, several MOIPs have institutionalised aspects of their missions through a variety of mechanisms. One way that governments show the private sector they are committed to a mission‑oriented approach is through a dedicated budget that is proportionate with the scale of change the missions seek to achieve. For instance, France’s Acceleration Strategies are part of the EUR 54 billion France 2030 strategy. The Acceleration Strategies are funded by extra-budgetary resources, which are in great part directly allocated to funding agencies, without influence by their supervisory ministries. This approach also provides more centralised steering (since the investment decisions are taken by the General Secretariat for Investment under authority of the Prime Minister) and more flexibility in funding allocation and management (as they are not subject to normal state budget regulations). This allows the missions to support a wide range of activities, from research and innovation to, for instance, training and market legitimacy.
As discussed above, the government of Korea enacts legislation for many of its flagship strategies across government. It has legislation for the Comprehensive Plan to Solve Social Problems Based on Science and Technology, which has a legal requirement mandating it be reviewed and updated every five years. This plan is now on its third iteration, and has become more mission-oriented after each update. It has taken a similar approach for its new mission-oriented programmes on strategic technologies and carbon‑neutral technologies (OECD, 2025[6]).
In a few cases, specific funding agreements have been secured at the level of entire sectors rather than with individual companies or consortia. This has been done notably in the context of the Dutch Mission-Driven and Top Sector Policy. The Knowledge and Innovation Covenant in the health and care area described precisely the financial commitments of all health and care public and private partners to the five missions in this area and the expected deliverables in return, as specified in the mission-specific agenda.7 In the United Kingdom, the Sector Deals coordinated financial commitments from related sectors to support specific UKRI Challenge Funds. For instance, the Aerospace Sector Deal passed in 2019 included a commitment of the government and the sector to provide up to GBP 125 million each to support R&D conducted in the Future Flight Challenge Fund. The government then tracked these commitments to ensure companies followed through with their commitments.8
Setting the right incentives for private sector engagement
So far, very few innovative financial models and funding instruments have been used to raise funding from the financial sector (OECD, 2024[1]). Missions mostly rely on classic project cost-sharing rules applied by the policy instruments they include in their “bundle” of interventions.
Crowding in private sector resources will require breaking the missions down into concrete problems/challenges and opening the missions up to bottom-up participation.
– Austria’s EU Missions, conference poster
This calls for the experimentation of new funding models, such as different types of public-private partnerships, blended finance options and equity financing for “mission co-operation”. Missions need to ensure their incentives build a business case for these types of stakeholders to support the mission goals, including by reorienting their plans and activities to some extent. For instance, the Flemish Participation Company is a public investment company that, among other areas, invests in promising circular growth companies that support the Circular Flanders missions. Korea mobilises the Social Venture Impact Guarantee Support System and the Social Value-based Impact Investment Fund to support technologies developed under the Comprehensive Plan to Solve Social Problems Based on Science and Technology (CP3). The Social Venture Impact Guarantee Support System provides preferential guarantees of up to KRW 200 million for social venture companies that create both social and economic value through innovative technologies or business models. For the National Strategic Technology (NST) Policy, the government also offers a wide variety of instruments to encourage corporate investment and participation. Beyond traditional R&D support, Korea offers preferential R&D tax credits for technologies related to its NST missions, and it has an “NST Certification System” for companies with superior technologies, which allows them to list on the KOSDAQ (the Korean stock exchange for emerging companies, like the NASDAQ), even if they have no sales.
Also in Korea, the Alchemist project9 has a three-part stage-gated process for supporting novel technologies to address societal challenges. It allows the private sector to follow the results from the first two stages without making any financial commitments, then at the third stage they can pay a subscription fee to gain priority access to the intellectual property developed by the researchers (OECD, 2025[6]).
Exploring alternative solutions
Missions strive to ensure a variety of technological and non-technological pathways can be considered to tackle their goals. To support this process, several missions have developed living labs (e.g. the Austrian Transformative Missions) – explicitly experimenting with different solutions – then scaling up approaches that show promise. Another way to enable this exploratory approach is through more flexible eligibility requirements – allowing for industry, academia and non-profits to take part in projects where traditional programmes may have clearer boundaries around eligibility.
To further support the exploration of different pathways, many MOIPs use a stage-gated approach for funding innovations, where they support several projects with a small amount of funding, then support fewer projects but with more funding at the following stage(s). This stage-gating allows missions to take a portfolio approach with less risk than one large bet on a single solution. For example, CSIRO has implemented a time-bound stage-gate framework for its mission programme. Ongoing investment for individual missions is contingent on satisfying design requirements. As outlined in its Mission Design Stage Gates Framework (see Figure 4.2), this builds in a cycle of implementation, evaluation and redesign.
Source: CSIRO (2023).
The cycles increase in length as missions mature. The United Kingdom’s UKRI Challenge Fund ran “pioneer challenges” on new, transformational, R&D-intensive areas at a lower scale to test if there was appetite in the sector for a full-scale challenge, and scaled some up in subsequent rounds. For some more challenge-oriented programmes, the stage-gated funding for R&D is the core of the programme (e.g. Korea’s Alchemist or Research Ireland’s Challenge Programmes; see Figure 4.3). These programmes still attempt to tap into other supports (e.g. follow-on funding from other sources and business advisory support) to scale up this work and create greater impact.
Source: Research Ireland.
Developing a market for mission solutions
Overall, creating market opportunities as part of the mission is, like in other policies, one of the most powerful incentives for private sector engagement.
There can be calls for expression and calls for proposals to see what’s out there (fishing). There can also be more direct contact with companies where engagement is needed to get them involved (hunting).
– Mission manager
This calls for missions to encompass different types of demand-led instruments in their policy mix to promote uptake by users within and outside of government (Laatsit, Grillitsch and Fünfschilling, 2025[2]). Among them, public procurement for innovation is particularly important to scale and deploy innovations.
This type of support provides innovators with a pathway to market, which can encourage investment in early-stage technologies and industries, further derisking their investments (Rabbie et al., 2025[7]). The traditional model for procurement for innovation is often based on the United States’ Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) programme. These types of programmes can be nested within other missions – such as the United States’ Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which sometimes uses SBIR (and other types of public procurement for innovation) to address aspects of its missions. The Department of Energy’s Energy Earthshots launched the Carbon Dioxide Removal Purchase Pilot Prize as part of its support for the Carbon Negative Shot. This is the first example of the US government agreeing to purchase these sorts of credits. Some companies have already made pledges to purchase these credits once the credits are verified by the Department of Energy. Only a few other mission programmes have integrated procurement into their policy mix and often only marginally.
Sometimes researchers do not see the varied use cases for their innovations. Korea has Innovative Product Scouts who identify solutions and help innovative products enter the government procurement market. The Innovation Product Scouts programme is also used to support the CP3.10 Local governments may consider creating networks and pooling their innovation procurement resources to help scale up place-based innovations across multiple markets.
In other cases, governments place the onus on the funding applicants to identify pathways to market. Research Ireland has embedded societal impact champions (most often, potential users) in each challenge team. Their task is to provide non-technical leadership and identify potential use cases for the technologies.11 In Norway’s Pilot-E, consortia applying for funding must include a first customer for the technology they plan to develop.
However, as revealed in most studies on missions, few of them include demand-side instruments. Mission policy mixes remain largely supply-push (OECD, 2024[1]).
Work with bridging organisations to leverage established relationships and networks to support the missions. In some cases, these organisations already exist; in others, establishing them can be part of the mission programming.
Institutionalise commitments to missions to signal that they are long-term priorities (e.g. through dedicated funding, legislation or contracts). Multi-year, flexible central pots of funding are also ways to instil confidence that missions are long-term priorities beyond electoral cycles.
Provide an adequate budget and funding instruments for missions that are consistent in terms of scope and amount with the mission objectives and theory of change. Particularly as missions mature, they require the resources to scale up the solutions they have developed.
Experiment with new funding models to encourage the financial sector to invest in missions (e.g. blended finance and equity financing).
Broaden the research and innovation policy portfolio to include incentives that are more attractive to the private sector, such as public procurement, demand-led policies, supporting mission-relevant demonstrators, prototypes or technology infrastructures.
Embed experimentation in the policy mix to explore a variety of technological and non-technological pathways in achieving the mission goals (e.g. living labs and stage-gated approaches). These experiments should have opportunities to learn from the different approaches and formal off-ramps to scale up promising techniques for addressing the mission goals.
Offering genuine opportunities to influence the mission design and implementation processes
Societal stakeholders and non-profits are more motivated by the missions themselves and what they are attempting to address. If missions aim to achieve large-scale societal change aligned with these organisations’ and the public’s priorities, then the buy-in will happen more naturally. Various participation, co-creation and citizen engagement methods exist to enable this, including consultation, deliberative workshops, education, solicitation, digital or financial participation, or even (community) activism (see, for example, (Paradies et al., 2021[8]). In Korea, the government conducted big data analysis, where it looked at public sentiment towards key social problems over recent years to establish and update missions under its CP312 (OECD, 2025[6]).
It is not a level playing field between civil society actors and big corporations, which have very different resources to take part in missions.
– Mission manager
Governments can also focus on building societal awareness of the missions to create a broader coalition of the willing to propose solutions and participate more broadly in the missions. There is a strong movement of fourth sector organisations that have social and environmental goals. At the same time, these organisations are very diverse and often smaller, without the capacity or resources to make broader change. Creating connections between these smaller organisations, as well as with larger philanthropies that may also have more resources, could help mobilise these groups more consistently.
Participation from these groups should be more than just collecting their needs and identifying the problems but also involve collaborative design of solutions. For example, one of the five Horizon Europe Missions is focused on establishing 100 living labs to support soil health. These labs are conducting transdisciplinary research on soil health in both urban and rural settings, commercial farms, forests, urban green parks, and industrial sites. They are involving a range of actors, including citizens, municipalities, schools, academia, non-governmental organisations, and companies to set up and monitor these experiments.
Sometimes you need to force this engagement in calls for proposals, otherwise you always fund the same people.
– Mission manager
Ensuring there is societal representation in the decision‑making bodies of the mission can build more legitimacy for missions with societal groups. Providing real opportunities also requires investing in capacity building and funding these groups’ activities. Korea’s CP3 supports citizen science and encourages members of civil society to learn and use the solutions that are developed through its missions using a dedicated platform and targeted outreach (OECD, 2025[6]). The National Research Council Canada’s Challenge Programs issue a variety of calls for proposals, some of which include conditions that the research teams involve a mix of industry, academia and non-profits. It also uses adapted eligibility criteria and sometimes regional scientific reviews, which requires the projects consider the needs of communities or indigenous groups the research is seeking to benefit.13
Supporting groups disadvantaged through the phase out of technologies
It is important to recognise that not everyone will benefit from some of the societal challenges missions seek to achieve: over the course of time, some groups win and others lose. As a result, mission owners should ensure they provide support for those who may lose out to maintain social cohesion and support, while also paying attention to dealing with established interests. Inequalities are negative externalities of transformative change, but they can also be caused by unaligned policies. In the context of missions, a just and fair societal transition cannot be taken for granted. Inequalities’ mitigation should be at the centre of the joint actions since they can fuel resentments which can have political consequences, as can be witnessed with some countries’ ambitious transition policies in the agricultural sector, for instance.
However, in most cases, the means for mitigating distributional effects are way out of reach of the missions’ policy mixes and budgets. Such a systemic scope, encompassing the “winners” and “losers” of the transition, would require a strong connection between the missions and the broader transition agenda and economic and social policies, which is not currently the case.
Set missions that are inspiring for society, engaging societal actors in their design.
Broadly publicise missions to build awareness of their goals and opportunities.
Include societal representatives in advisory and decision-making bodies to ensure their perspectives are continuously taken into account at each step of the process (e.g. identifying societal challenges to address, co-designing missions and collaborating on developing the solutions).
Support groups and industries affected by the phase out of technologies that are counter to the missions to avoid creating new inequalities.
The OECD conducted a template-based consultation of mission practitioners. A total of 30 responses were received, representing as many MOIP initiatives. Based on these inputs, the OECD developed a series of posters, validated by the mission teams. The results of the survey were later coded by inference by the OECD to identify common themes across the key issues. The results related to crowding in are presented in this box.
Strengths
The main strength in this key issue refers to dedicated mission investment/venture funding, which are seen as important vehicles for crowding in private-sector investment and human resources (representing 22% of the responses). Initiatives point to incentives to mobilise funds and include different stakeholders where it makes sense in mission work. Besides including incentives for private investment through special benefits, initiatives such as the Research Ireland Challenge Programmes seek to collaborate with industry, decision makers and the community, providing financing and/or intellectual advice. The second most common response underscores co-funding requirements to crowd-in the private sector (17%). This approach reduces the financial burden on companies but ensures they have “skin in the game” towards the mission projects. Another core strength is the involvement of private sector stakeholders in mission governance (15%). Including industry members in decision-making bodies to frame the missions, co-designing the implementation framework, and advising the government on the implementation are all ways businesses support mission governance. Related to this topic is co-designing missions with private sector partners and other stakeholders (12%), which demonstrates the important interplay between framing missions and crowding-in private investment. Lastly, the diversity of incentives across sectors is an important approach to ensure that support is available at different stages in the innovation chain (12%). A broad policy mix helps derisk private investments in mission-driven activities to mobilise capital, foster sustained engagement and align business with mission goals.
Weaknesses
The two main weaknesses relate to inadequate funding instruments (27%) and difficulties in incentivising business participation at large (27%). For instance, Czechia reports how it is a challenge to mobilise the private sector to focus its attention on missions, let alone then investing and taking part in government programmes. Some of the responses point to how the missions are not aligned with business models while other cases face resistance from companies – especially small and medium-sized enterprises – who have limited resources to direct towards more risky research. Initiatives underline the current focus on supply-side mechanisms instead of demand-side instruments, such as public procurement. In addition, the next most common response relates to the perceived complexity of missions in terms of bureaucratic processes (12%). Third, governance and leadership issues limit crowding in engagement (9%). Lastly, respondents pointed to the risk aversion of the private sector, especially in emergent industries such as quantum technology, due to its capital-intensive and high-risk nature (6%).
Note: The top five strengths and weaknesses related to crowding in represent, respectively, 70% of the 83 responses and 82% of the 33 responses under this pillar.
References
[4] Aström, T., E. Arnold and J. Olsson (2021), Meta-evaluation of the Second Round of Strategic Innovation Programmes After Six Years, https://www.vinnova.se/contentassets/e9aafdfe5f67491ab2f7016758458ac5/metautvardering-av-andra-omgangen-strategiska-innovationsprogram-efter-sex-ar.pdf?cb=20201215174117.
[5] CSIRO (2023), Convening Missions: A Playbook for Collective Implementation of Mission-oriented Innovation, https://www.csiro.au/en/about/challenges-missions.
[2] Laatsit, M., M. Grillitsch and L. Fünfschilling (2025), Great expectations: The promises and limits of innovation policy in addressing societal challenges, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048733325000137.
[3] Nylander, J., W. Polt and M. Weber (2024), Missions Playbook: Stories from Practice, https://www.trami5missions.eu/sites/default/files/2024-04/TRAMI%20Missions%20Playbook_final_non-accessibiliy-ver-compressed.pdf.
[6] OECD (2025), “Challenges and opportunities of mission-oriented innovation policy in Korea”, OECD Science, Technology and Industry Policy Papers, No. 172, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/d725304c-en.
[1] OECD (2024), Mission-Oriented Innovation Policies for Net Zero: How Can Countries Implement Missions to Achieve Climate Targets?, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/5efdbc5c-en.
[8] Paradies, G. et al. (2021), Citizen participation in the Netherlands: Participation methods for the themes of national climate policy, wind energy on land, and gas-free neighbourhoods, https://publications.tno.nl/publication/34638885/DEKbnY/TNO-2021-P10528.pdf.
[7] Rabbie, J. et al. (2025), Accelerating transformation: Demand-led applications of quantum technologies in the energy transition, https://euspri2025.de/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Parallel-Sessions_EuSPRI_25-05-08.pdf.
← 1. The evaluation of Pilot E showed that the beneficiaries were generally satisfied with the schemes, although it involved three agencies and a wider portfolio approach. See: https://stip.oecd.org/moip/case-studies/2.
← 7. The Convenant 2023-2023 is available at: https://www.health-holland.com/sites/default/files/downloads/kennis-en-innovatieconvenant-2020-2023-gezondheid-en-zorg.pdf.
← 8. The Aerospace Sector Deal is available at: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5c10e9a040f0b60c8d6019b0/aerospace-sector-deal-web.pdf.