• Project description:

Societal challenges such as sustainability and climate change and technological dynamics via digitisation have led to the discussion, how research an innovation policy can be enabled for a more agile reaction and proactive guidance addressing new trends and challenges. However, the claim for agility has been formulated in different manners, because there is no common, coherent understanding on what kind of criteria contribute to an agile research and innovation policy. This research gap was addressed by the project “Agility in research and innovation policy – conception, definition, operationalisation”. By reconsidering the literature, a concept of agility has been developed and validated via expert workshops from relevant German ministries and expert interviews. 

Our team have been involved in the whole project as co-partners. We were leading the literature review and the development of an agility concept for further validation and analysis as well as the two main case studies for validating our agility project (so-called pilot applications) and the German research and innovation policy addressing COVID-19 as additional case:

• Conceptualisation of an agile research and innovation policy from different streams of literature in form of five criteria and different levels and actors of governance
• Analysis of the research and innovation policy for SMEs in Germany as a pilot application of agile policy making
• Analysis of the demand-sided innovation policy for the governance of renewable energy diffusion at the German power market as another pilot application
• Overview and analysis on programs and instruments supporting research on COVID-19 and vaccination and healing methods at the German and the European level

• Funding body: Expert Commission for Research and Innovation (Expertenkommission für Forschung und Innovation, EFI)
• Project duration: Jan 2020 – Sep 2020
• Project team: Univ.-Prof. Dr. Carsten Dreher, Dr. Martina Kovač, Carsten Schwäbe
• Project coordination: Dr. Matthias Weber, Austrian Institute of Technology

Academic partners: 

• Austrian Institute of Technology, Center for Innovation Systems and Policy
• Freie Universität Berlin, Professorship for Innovation Management