INTRODUCTION

Innovation is needed to sustain economic growth, but the position of the Netherlands in terms of innovation is not a very good one. It was shown in chapter 2 that in recent years the eu has lagged behind the us in productivity growth, and within the eu the Netherlands takes up a middle position. The Netherlands performs below the eu average in six out of eight indicators of innovativeness. It was shown in chapter 5 that although in recent years the number of new firms has risen rather spectacularly, this can largely be attributed to employees continuing their activities in self-employment for fiscal and ‘lifestyle’ reasons. On average, small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMES) in the Netherlands have become less rather than more innovative in the last decade, and the percentage of innovative smes is much lower than the eu average. Therefore, there is an urgent policy issue: how can innovation be increased?

We have argued that innovation is a system phenomenon, with multiple types of individual and collective agents, including firms, entrepreneurs, institutes for education and research, policymakers, regulatory agencies, and many types of services and intermediaries, interacting in a variety of ways. Actions and interactions are enabled by institutions and forms of organisation (of firms and between firms), and in turn affect those institutions. In this innovation system institutional logics and dynamics arise that are difficult to manage, and yield unexpected and often adverse effects.

As argued in chapters 1 and 2, for an adequate innovation policy we need an adequate understanding of the micro-level actions and interactions of agents, in competition and collaboration, in idea generation, implementation, and diffusion of innovations. Little is known of the micro-foundations and institutional conditions of innovation policy, and the purpose of this book is to contribute to the further development of that insight and corresponding policy.

In this book we have discussed theories of cognition, learning, and trust (chapters 3 and 7), and we have analysed the following elements of the innovation system: the generation and utilisation of ideas (chapter 4), entrepreneurship (chapter 5 and 6), and the internal (chapters 8 and 9), and the external organisation of innovation (chapters 10 and 11). In this final chapter we summarise the main lines of analysis and we present our conclusions. We begin with a summary of the conceptual and theoretical perspectives that we have used.