Innovation policy transformed?

Innovation policy is changing. No longer focused solely on growth and competitiveness, today’s strategies increasingly address societal challenges such as the green transition, digitalisation, and social inclusion. This paper provides the quantitative evidence of this shift, analysing STI strategies from 24 OECD countries using natural language processing techniques. It finds that goals linked to societal impact now make up over 40% of strategies’ topics — more than twice that of traditional objectives. New policy approaches, including joint governance, foresight, and agility, are also gaining ground. This change in innovation policy is mainly driven by the prominence of green transition goals in strategies (18.6%), followed by social and regional inclusion (9.9%) and digitalisation (9.5%). New STI policy approaches are also prominently featured with references to joint governance (5.4%), policy agility (5.2%) – such as foresight and evaluation – and directional policy (2.3%).