Additional thoughts arrived from the publisher:

Dear Caroline,

Many thanks for your message, and for sending on the link to your blog, which looks a very immediate and interesting approach to discussing the idea with potential contributors and other interested individuals. I have now opened this up and would like to look through this carefully before coming back to you with our thoughts. In the meantime, I thought I would get back to you on the other points in your email below.

I attach a copy of the Table of Contents for the book you mention - The Theory and Practice of Innovation Policy: An International Research Handbook. I do hope that this helps you to see how a volume such as we have been discussing would not be compromised or overlap, but would rather complement each other. We do see that there is room in the market for both and that the volume we have been discussing would be quite different. We do look forward to hopefully seeing your ideas, in due course and when you are ready to perhaps discuss your ideas with us.

In the meantime, I do hope that the sample handbooks I arranged will reach you fairly shortly, so you can look through these and compare the approaches taken.

As regards the other handbooks we have published, these are tailored to international markets and we have found them to be very successful volumes. A number of the volumes that are linked or in your area of interest are doing very well including;

Handbook of Innovation Systems and Developing Countries
Lundvall, B.-Å.   Joseph, K.J.   Chaminade, C.   Vang, J.
978 1 84720 609 1/ 978 1 84980 276 5

The Handbook of Innovation and Services
Gallouj, F.   Djellal, F.
978 1 84720 504 9/ 978 1 84980 374 8

Handbook of Regional Innovation and Growth
Cooke, P.   Asheim, B.   Boschma, R.   Martin, R.   Schwartz, D.   Tödtling, F.
978 1 84844 417 1

Of course we have very strong lists in economics, business and law (both practitioner and academic) and our handbooks in these areas are also extremely successful. It is therefore difficult for us to compare these as the markets are so very different.

I am afraid that I am on holiday now but will be back in the office next Thursday, when I will be in touch again, having been able to read through the blog more fully.

With all good wishes,

Alex

Defining innovation-what would you add?

—New to market – as novelty

—New to world – as change

—New to solving a specific problem – as ingenuity

—New to sector – as advantage

Could be said to be change that adds to the comfort, convenience, and efficiency; largely a study of interaction of capital, labor, technology; and involves the study of complex change over time.

What else would we add to the definition?

A handbook that policymakers could actually use?

Kieron's article is excellent! It points up so many of the problems facing the policymaking process that the article could serve as a set of key starting points for additional thinking for a book on responsible innovation policy.

One of the ideas that Kieron critiques is the problem of decisionmaking at various levels of governance. There is so little guidance out there for the local level policymakers that they mostly have to operate on their own. This is at least one area where a real handbook with real policy choices could be helpful.

If I could flame for a little bit, my own experience is that policymakers do not read the scholarly literature and thus there is very very little diffusion of knowledge between academics studying and theorizing on policy and the practice of good policymaking. Thus they remain unaided by the scholars who are in the field, scholars who, apparently, want to help improve policy.

What would a handbook look like that would actually be used by and help policymakers? (Should we ask a few of them?)

Too many handbooks?

Yes there are definitely already too many handbooks but perhaps there is still a gap to be filled… 

As far as I can see the existing handbooks cover either the dynamics of innovation (i.e. innovation studies) or are prescriptive handbooks of "what should be in innovation policies in an ideal world". Such books have not nearly enough in them about innovation policy problems/challenges in the world we all actually live in, the difficulty of making, implementing and evaluating innovation policies in the real world, and the politics with a small "p" that all this involves. I would particularly like to see some honest discussion about the limitations of innovation policy which in turn would encourage us to look at where innovation policy analysis can actually be usefully focused in the real world. I've written a bit about this myself (with colleagues):

https://www.escholar.manchester.ac.uk/uk-ac-man-scw:119191

If you want to join this discussion, please email Caroline Wagner, carolineswagner@gmail.com

One idea for the handbook would be to focus it on innovation policy for sustainability and inclusion. This would certainly fill a gap in the literature. What do you think of this idea? Who would be good contributors?

Further references

Adding two cents to the list of references:

A classic in the economics of innovation is the multi-author "The pace and direction of inventive activity" (1962) and the revisiting of this influential book 50 years later (2012, NBER)--with some of the same authors (Arrow, Nelson, etc). Important to complement this work are the reports of the Yale (1987) and Carnegie (1994) surveys on industrial R&D (see Cohen, Nelson, and Walsh, 2000, NBER).

Also worth considering is the acerbic criticism of Philip Mirowski to mainstream economics of innovation. The response to classic essays published in "Science bought and sold" (2001, U. of Chicago Press), was followed by two important books "The effortless economy of science?" (2004, Duke U. Press) and "ScienceMart: Privatizing American science" (2011, Harvard U. Press).