This chapter synthetises the analytical framework upon which the new developments presented in the remainder of the report rely. It emphasises the specific characteristics of missions that differentiate them from traditional policy frameworks, notably their integrated nature, from objectives to implementation, as well as their multidimensional and multilevel features. It also presents the different types of missions revolving around these common features.
Mission‑Oriented Innovation Policies for Net Zero
How Can Countries Implement Missions to Achieve Climate Targets?
Abstract
Since the OECD started working on mission-oriented innovation policies (MOIPs) in 2019, it has followed and deepened the same analytical framework based on the MOIP “design principles” and a typology, which have been further refined in recent years to develop mission implementation support tools, notably a “mission theory of action” and a “mission monitoring tool”.
2.1.1. The three integrated building blocks of mission-oriented innovation policies
Although they can differ significantly in their design and type of objectives, MOIPs revolve around three building blocks (Figure 2.1. ):
1. Strategic orientation: They are oriented toward the achievement of clear objectives, formalised in terms of expected results (not inputs invested or actions to be implemented) and developed collectively.
2. Policy co-ordination: They align the plans of various government actors in charge of different components (e.g., knowledge, technologies, funding, instruments pertaining to different policy fields, regulations) that are essential for achieving the collectively agreed-upon objectives.
3. Policy implementation: They are implemented via a comprehensive mix of policy interventions and various initiatives to support a range of activities, from research to market launch and the formation of the required skills. These packages of interventions are deliberately designed to achieve the policy’s objectives. They can include joint implementation initiatives (from joint calls for proposal to co‑operative, co-funded schemes and programmes) that bring together multiple partners across policy fields and sectors.
Collective action lies at the core of each of these building blocks: an MOIP involves a collectively developed agenda; a dedicated structure of governance to take and monitor the effects of common or mutually consistent decisions; and, finally, a deliberately designed “joined-up” policy mix. What is unique about MOIPs is not the presence of any of these building blocks taken in isolation (which are found in all STI systems) but rather their integration into a common organisational and institutional framework. Neither a whole-of-government national strategy for green hydrogen nor a high-level cross‑ministerial council for industry decarbonisation or a large-scale co‑operative programme for a circular economy are sufficient to form an MOIP. For any given challenge, an MOIP, by definition, combines and maintains close bi‑directional flows of decisions and information between the three building blocks.
2.1.2. Strategic orientation
The substantive and political issue of the directions of change has been largely absent from STI policy for decades, resulting in broad functional strategic frameworks and neutral and indirect policy measures. The focus on complex and systemic societal challenges and the transformations they require has revealed the “directionality failures” of existing STI systems inherited during this period. As argued by Weber and Rohracher (2012[1]), “transformative change, on the contrary, is intimately linked to the question of direction and requires the setting of collective priorities”. The first function of MOIPs is to provide an institutional space in which public and private actors of a challenge community can become aware of their complementarities and interdependencies and set a process for collectively developing objectives and a strategic agenda to solve these challenges.
All missions, therefore, produce sets of well-accepted objectives related to the realisation of the complex challenge they tackle. These “directions for change” are the cornerstone of any mission that set the ground for subsequent collective action. They are developed in very different ways and take various forms. They can be packaged in a catchy and inspiring mission statement (e.g., “reduce emissions from road transport by 50% by 2030”) but most often start with very broadly defined challenge areas and are further specified into co-developed strategic agendas as the mission unfolds.
This is certainly where the main misunderstanding regarding MOIPs resides: they are still often characterised as (and criticised for) being top-down, while the definition of their objectives is often mostly bottom-up, involving a wide array of public and private stakeholders. Previous OECD work on MOIPs has revealed that the process of developing mission orientations is gradual and involves progressively refining the objectives. Missions often begin from broad challenges and the bulk of the mission work is, based on these, to collectively develop a strategic agenda that is both consensual and precise enough to guide collective action. Important implications of this observation are that:
The objectives of the mission are often the result of the mission process itself rather than its starting point.
The distinction between “top-down” and “bottom-up” missions is blurred; most missions proceed through successive top-down and bottom-up stages.
Public authorities find a new role in several MOIPs as “moderators”. The state often orchestrates the process of co-creating the strategic agenda with little intervention in the actual directional decisions.
The active involvement of mission stakeholders in the definition of the strategic agenda is particularly crucial to ensuring their subsequent engagement in the implementation of the mission. It is also, along with high-level political and administrative back-up, a condition of their legitimacy, which, in turn, can help justify large budget requests and some possible derogations to “policy-as-usual” practices (i.e. multiannual funding, more hands-on project management). It is also instrumental to prepare the acceptance of societal transformation whose potential social impacts may be significant.
MOIPs rely on multiple but rather traditional ways of engaging stakeholders (online consultations, consultation events, etc.). One difference is that they tend to be more systematic and better resourced as they are considered to be a key component of the MOIP approach. More recently, new participatory practices seem to diffuse among missions, notably the common definition of road maps, theory of change and pathways.
➤ The main “how-to” conundrums of strategic orientation in missions
How to set the adequate level and scope of mission objectives that are both ambitious and realistic?
How to combine the solution neutrality of objectives while providing clear directionality to focus collective efforts?
How to set firm and credible common objectives while leaving enough flexibility to make them evolve as new information and knowledge are accumulated?
How to ensure the high-level political legitimacy of missions while avoiding
short-term political interferences and ensuring longevity beyond electoral cycles?
How to ensure strong stakeholder involvement in the collective development of the strategic agenda while avoiding mission capture by powerful incumbents?
How to engage a wide array of partners while maintaining clear direction and consistency in the objectives and avoiding “mission dilution”?
2.1.3. Policy co-ordination
As stated by Peters (2018[2]), “attempting to deal with a problem such as climate change or sustainable development requires the involvement of much of government, and hence co-ordination”. To tackle such complex and systemic challenges, whether climate change, the reduction of biodiversity or cancer, MOIPs bring together different policy bodies responsible for various stages of the innovation chain (from research to deployment) and different components of innovation systems (such as skills, infrastructure, research and development [R&D], regulations), possibly at different levels of governance (supranational, national, regional, local). This wide set of mission partners uses different types of committees to agree on common objectives, monitor and refine them, align their plans towards these goals, and decide upon needed investments and actions. They vary greatly according to their composition, their mandate (e.g. decision making, monitoring and evaluation, consultation), their level (strategic, operational), and the status of the decisions they take (more or less binding).
Governance bodies (e.g. steering committees, orientation committees, governing boards) and other formal co-ordination mechanisms (such as roundtables) are found at the levels of an MOIP initiative and of each of its missions. At the level of missions, a key complement to these bodies is often a unique mission co-ordinator with strong prerogatives.
Previous analysis based on numerous interviews and workshops with mission leaders has shown that cross-governmental co-ordination is one of the main practical challenges. This is confirmed by a recent survey of mission practitioners and stakeholders, who rank “silo effects” as the highest barrier to a mission’s success (OECD and DDC, 2022[3]). MOIP partners strive to work horizontally across administrative silos while navigating vertical funding streams, reporting lines, incentives and mindsets.
To be able to co-ordinate actions, these bodies have set formal or informal rules, defined specific roles for each member, and some have signed formal co-operation and commitment agreements. They are also governed by more “underground” aspects inherent in all collective action, namely power relationships, and competitive games between partners (particularly in terms of the scope of intervention and budget (OECD, 2024[4]).
➤ The main “how-to” conundrums of policy co-ordination in missions
How to ensure the consistency of different policy makers’ plans across policy sectors and levels of governance in a context characterised by fragmentation, political and administrative turf, conflicting objectives, and compartmentalised funding?
How to ensure broad holistic co-ordination across all silos while ensuring sufficient leadership to allow swift and agile decision making within the mission?
How to match the scope of the missions that aim to support sustainability transitions and the level of authority of the mission in the government structure (agency, ministry, centre of government)?
2.1.4. Policy implementation
Once the policy makers and stakeholders in a given challenge area have defined a shared strategic agenda and set governance arrangements to co-ordinate their plans and investments, a mission requires policy integration, i.e. the operational articulation of a consistent and tailor-made package of policy interventions and activities to realise the mission objectives.1 The degree of integration varies between missions. Some missions function as “one initiative” integrating the different interventions, or at least appear as such to beneficiaries (“one-stop shop missions”), while others only ensure regular operational co-ordination and information exchange meetings between the different responsible policy bodies.
Novel portfolio management practices are essential to successfully integrate the policy interventions and activities. However, these practices require specific skills, mindsets, and human and financial resources to provide hands-on support that significantly differs from traditional arm’s-length and formal management. The portfolio manager (most often the mission co-ordinator or leader) must build the portfolio backward from the objectives and make it evolve as new information is unveiled and progress is made. This also requires new management tools and techniques, such as visualisation tools to dynamically map the portfolio. Portfolio management also involves promoting interactions between the different complementary activities of the mission (OECD, 2024[5]).
Despite progress in the evaluation of systemic and complex programmes and policies (or portfolios thereof), current methodologies and frameworks still fall short of providing the resources needed for mission evaluations. Missions require different evaluation perspectives, frameworks, methods, criteria and practices, including the very questions to be asked, the data to be collected and other markers of change. The literature on missions and other types of transition or transformative policies widely acknowledges this need for some renewal in evaluation (Haddad et al., Molas-Gallart et al., 2021). Recent OECD work recommends that mission monitoring and evaluation focus on tracking processes with specific tools to capture the specific additional effects of missions, in addition to the various policy instruments they mobilise. A range of academic and practical works are underway to develop and test these tools and methods (Larrue, Tõnurist and Jonason, 2024[6]).
➤ The main “how-to conundrums” of policy implementation in missions
How to practically combine different instruments with different funding sources, selection criteria, operating procedures, reporting systems, information systems?
How to promote information and knowledge exchange between different instruments and activities to ensure synergies while taking into account confidentiality and competitive relations between some of the actors?
How to perform hands-on mission portfolio management in administrations suffering from staff shortages, limited budgets and inadequate skills forged in previous practices?
How to ensure the cohesion of the horizontal (cross-departmental) mission teams when all reporting lines and funding streams are vertical (departmental)?
How to design monitoring and evaluation processes that ensure mission accountability while recognising their long-term and exploratory nature?
How to attribute mission effects and failures to ensure a sense of responsibility and engagement in multi-partner, co-funded, collective missions?
MOIPs are multi-level systems, which include an overarching policy framework “hosting” several missions that steer, co-ordinate and integrate existing policy interventions and activities (Figure 2.2):
Most missions are grouped in a common policy framework: the MOIP initiative. At this level, the directions remain general (e.g., solving the most pressing societal challenges while improving national competitiveness) and functional (i.e. using a mission and transformative approach to solve these challenges). The role of the governance bodies is to select the challenge areas and missions, provide overarching advice, ensure linkages to the political sphere and high-level co‑ordination across policy fields, and monitor and evaluate the implementation of the missions. Some support services can also be found at this level to manage budgets, improve and harmonise practices (including by promoting interaction between missions), and set the appropriate framework conditions for their successful realisation.
Missions are the collective action vehicles focused on a specific challenge, with a corresponding strategic agenda, governance structure and policy mix. It is at this level that actors become aware of their common fate and opportunities for collective action and, consequently, where most systemic effects are produced.
Policy interventions and activities are the concrete actions undertaken to realise the mission objectives. They pertain to different stages of the innovation chain (from research to scale-up and deployment), components of the underpinning innovation system (from R&D to skills and regulations), and generations of innovative solutions (from the least to the most mature) of various types (technological, organisational, behavioural, social and all possible combinations of these).
Note: MOIP: mission-oriented innovation policy.
While MOIP initiatives and missions can have very diverse designs, scales and scopes, they still share fundamental common features.
2.3.1. The mission-oriented innovation policy design principles
The three building blocks can be further broken down into “design principles”. They define the features that are anticipated in MOIP initiatives that match the OECD definition. They apply to an MOIP ideal type, as very few initiatives – if any – will meet every criterion. In reality, these principles are often mixed and adapted according to the vast differences in MOIP designs, influenced by country-specific factors, thematic nuances and other variables. While these design principles provide a normative framework to guide policy direction, they remain versatile, accommodating various types of initiatives tailored to different mission and governance contexts.
The design principles pertaining to the three building blocks are:
1. strategic orientation: directionality and intentionality, legitimacy, flexibility
2. policy co-ordination: horizontality and verticality, novelty, demand articulation
3. policy implementation: policy-mix consistency, fundability, evaluability and reflexivity.
Figure 2.3 presents a succinct definition of each design principle.
Annex A provides definitions of the design principles and corresponding questions to assess their degree of realisation. Each of these design principles represents a potential line of improvement, as needed in each specific mission case. The general and gradual improvement of a mission across these design principles increases the degree of “mission orientation” or, more colloquially, “degree of missionness”. Building on this analytical framework, the OECD Mission Action Lab developed a monitoring tool which was tested in real conditions in the context of the “Austrian EU missions” (see Box 4.2).
2.3.2. The different types of missions
The different types of missions vary notably in their scope and the extent to which they embrace the mission-oriented policy approach, i.e., how far they go in steering, co‑ordinating and integrating activities to address a specific challenge (hereafter, the degree of maturity) (Figure 2.4).
Missions distinguish themselves from the most traditional STI policy frameworks (1) composed of individual instruments with single goals (e.g. increasing R&D investment) to alleviate specific market failures (e.g. underinvestment in R&D due to the low appropriability and high uncertainty of research results). These policies, inherited from decades of influence of the New Public Management doctrine, are characterised by a narrow scope and a low level of integration of the instrument portfolio. Large “umbrella missions” (2) gather in a single institutional vehicle (whether officially termed as a “mission” or not), multiple public interventions addressing various needs to tackle a common goal. However, these interventions are loosely integrated, only involving, for the most part, an exchange of information between the various responsible authorities and common ex post monitoring rather than ex ante collective decision making and real joint action.
The two remaining missions correspond to the two most traditional types of missions depicted in the literature: the acceleration and transformative missions. Acceleration missions (3) closely integrate a portfolio of instruments to pursue focused and well-delineated goals, in most cases related to the development of green technological innovations. Transformative missions (4) combine a wide systemic scope and a significant level of integration to commonly steer activities along a collectively defined pathway to address a challenge.
Yet, as the difficulty of designing and implementing missions increases with the scope, only very few mission initiatives (if any) have managed to achieve a high degree of “mission orientation” on a wide scope. However, missions evolve as organisations involved in MOIPs learn and gradually improve how to do missions and MOIPs gain legitimacy and enlist new partners. Two main evolution pathways toward transformative missions can be identified: 1) the evolution of large umbrella missions to become more integrated (for instance in Germany from the High-Tech Strategy 2025 missions and its 12 missions to the new “Future Strategy” and its 6 missions). This requires time, as it involves building trust between the involved parties and reforming many incentives and formal and informal processes; and 2) efforts to broaden the scope of acceleration missions to establish larger, more systemic national missions while maintaining their close co‑ordination (for instance in Norway from the Pilot-E scheme to the two recent national missions embedded in the Long-term Plan for Higher Education and Research 2023-2032).
Note: STI: science, technology and innovation.
A typology developed in previous OECD work identified four main MOIP types (Larrue, 2021[7]). Table 2.1 presents each type, a selection of corresponding examples of MOIPs, and their distinctive strengths and weaknesses.
Note: MOIP: mission-oriented innovation policy; BMK: Federal Ministry for Climate Action, Environment, Energy, Mobility, Innovation and Technology: CSIRO: Commonwealth Scientific & Industrial Research Organisation.
References
[7] Larrue, P. (2021), “The design and implementation of mission-oriented innovation policies: A new systemic policy approach to address societal challenges”, OECD Science, Technology and Industry Policy Papers, No. 100, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/3f6c76a4-en.
[6] Larrue, P., P. Tõnurist and D. Jonason (2024), “Monitoring and evaluation of mission-oriented innovation policies: From theory to practice”, OECD Science, Technology and Industry Working Papers, No. 2024/09, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/5e4c3204-en.
[4] OECD (2024), “Governing missions: Securing effective governance to enable mission success”, OECD Science, Technology and Industry Policy Papers, OECD Publishing, Paris, forthcoming.
[5] OECD (2024), “Mission portfolio management: Towards a dynamic practice”, OECD Science, Technology and Industry Policy Papers, OECD Publishing, Paris.
[3] OECD and DDC (2022), Mission-oriented Innovation Needs Assessment Survey, OECD and Danish Design Center, https://ddc.dk/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/REPORT-mission-needs-assessment-survey-110222-.pdf.
[2] Peters, B. (2018), “The challenge of policy coordination”, Policy Design and Practice, Vol. 1/1, pp. 1-11, https://doi.org/10.1080/25741292.2018.1437946.
[8] Tosun, J. and A. Lang (2017), “Policy integration: Mapping the different concepts”, Policy Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, Vol. 38/6, pp. 553-570, https://doi.org/10.1080/01442872.2017.1339239.
[9] Trein, P., M. Iris and M. Martino (2019), “The integration and coordination of public policies: A systematic comparative review”, Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis: Research and Practice, Vol. 21/4, pp. 332-349, https://doi.org/10.1080/13876988.2018.1496667.
[1] Weber, K. and H. Rohracher (2012), “Legitimizing research, technology and innovation policies for transformative change: Combining insights from innovation systems and multi-level perspective in a comprehensive “failures” framework”, Research Policy, Vol. 41/6, pp. 1037-1047, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2011.10.015.
← 1. A voluminous amount of research exists on the concept of policy integration since the 1990s and since the beginning the OECD has been one of the most active organisations to operationalise this concept. There are different views on and definitions of policy integration and how it is a form of or differs from policy co-ordination (see, for instance, Trein, Iris and Martino (2019[9])). In the MOIP analytical report, policy integration is distinct from policy co-ordination and refers exclusively to the consistent and cross-sectoral implementation of policy instruments, including its most practical implications. Following the distinction made by Tosun and Lang (2017[8]), policy integration is realised by means of policy instruments and is of procedural nature. Co-ordination, which refers to plans’ alignment with shared goals, is of a substantive nature.