Policies to boost the impact of public research can be classified into three broad categories. Firstly, policy initiatives promoting research excellence encourage frontier research by providing large-scale, long-term competitive funding to selected research centres. Secondly, policies supporting knowledge transfer aim at commercialising the results of public research through patent licensing, spin-off companies, and other channels. Thirdly, policies promoting science-industry co-creation focus on fostering more intense modes of research collaboration through joint funding, shared facilities and mixed teams; often involving other civil society stakeholders besides public research institutions and firms. This paper illustrates the variety of options available within each of these three types of policies, based on a review of twelve case studies across nine different countries. The analysis draws attention to the design options, budgets, implementation challenges, international scope, evaluation practices and lessons learnt from these policy initiatives.