engleski

Innovation policy in Croatia, Slovenia and Finland: Towards multiple ‘best practices’?

Although innovation policy is generally recognised to be vitally important, few countries in Europe have developed and implemented adequate evaluation practices related to innovation policies and programmes ; since the use of evaluation varies very much from country to country, one may talk about different “evaluation cultures” (EU Innovation, 2005). Moreover, evaluation is burdened by a trade-off between complexity of evaluation (which is also related to the respect towards economic, institutional, cultural and other differences) and comparability of evaluation results across countries. The more complex an evaluation becomes, the less likely it is that its results will be easily comparable or transferable to other countries. Given the difficulties in defining ‘good’ or ‘best’ practices, the exchange of experiences and evaluation results is hindered. Consequently, it is reasonable and relevant to define and analyse in detail innovation policy in a smaller group of relatively similar countries at different levels of innovation performance, overall economic development and EU integration. This paper aims to tackle innovation policy in Croatia, Slovenia and Finland. All of them are small peripheral European countries ; two of them (Croatia and Slovenia) have largely shared institutional background, whereas the third one (Finland) is perceived as a global innovation leader with a particularly strong culture of evaluation related to innovation policy (cf. Ministry of Education of Finland, 2009). When it comes to classification of these countries within the Innovation Union Scoreboard framework (IUS, 2011), Finland is classified as innovation leader, Slovenia as innovation follower and Croatia as moderate innovator – i.e. they occupy three adjoining ranks. Hereby the policy objective of Finland is to preserve its leading role, whereas policymakers in Slovenia and Croatia aim at improving innovation performance. The paper thus proposes to obtain a deeper insight into effectiveness of innovation policy and its best practices through an analysis of these three cases. Finland is analysed as a developed EU economy which is often used as a best practice example of effective knowledge-based development (innovation leader). Slovenia is viewed as a new EU member state with that aims towards developing a knowledge-based economy (innovation follower). Croatia is analysed as an accession country which has been developing innovation policy while lagging behind in terms of competitiveness and EU accession (moderate innovator). The research indicated that there are common elements of the innovation policy mix which are necessary prerequisites for its effectiveness. Furthermore, specific characteristics of an effective innovation policy depend upon its institutional environment, financial system and industrial structure. Finally, the complexity of innovation policy increases with the differentiation of the national innovation system.

innovation policy, evaluation, Croatia, Slovenia, Finland

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