Mission-oriented innovation policies are becoming increasingly popular among policymakers and scholars. We maintain that these policies are based on an overly mechanistic view of innovation and economic growth, suggesting that a more bottom-up approach is called for. By invoking an entrepreneurial ecosystem perspective, we point out that innovative entrepreneurship requires many other actors—besides the entrepreneur—whose skills and abilities are necessary to realize an entrepreneurial project. When mission-oriented policies play a large role in the economy, connections between actors in the ecosystem risk becoming distorted. A functioning and well-balanced entrepreneurial ecosystem requires instead an institutional framework that levels the playing field for potential entrepreneurs and encourages productive entrepreneurship.
To promote this kind of system, we discuss in more detail eight key areas where appropriate horizontal or bottom-up policy measures can foster innovation and, in the end, the welfare-enhancing productive entrepreneurship policymakers and scholars strive for.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.