At its Lisbon Summit in March 2000, the European Council decided to apply the Open Method of Coordination (OMC) to innovation policies. The aim is to establish a European Research Area, in which the OMC shall increase the coherence of regional, national and European policies. Until now, however, the OMC has only been applied to a very limited extent. We argue that this development is due to the fact that there are specific conditions for policy coordination in the emerging European multi-level innovation system that have hardly been mirrored by late EU initiatives for a more coherent European Research Area and its new open method of coordination.