What is exciting about policy is that it provides with a leverage – people, capital, new laws and rules, media attention can be focused towards a goal, to change the way people live and create new possibilities. How this happens: policy instruments – for example programs for investment in research, providing new grants for students, making new exchange arrangements, scientific collaboration etc. – are capable of making people spend their time differently (on new projects, labs, universities, together with others they would not have been able to work with otherwise), of changing the way they move in space (travelling on exchange, conferences, workshops, discussions, project meetings) and create relationships. This means that policy is about creating the time-space framework of how people spend their time and use their creative energy. And this is a process rather than a final state.
But for decades, fragmentation has been seen as the main problem of European policy making and the main goal has been to integrate: countries, people, universities, research laboratories, etc. This is the goal of the 7th Framework Programme (FP). Fragmentation is the worst enemy, because it is the cause for declining European competitiveness. Therefore the main instruments the Commission is using are about putting people together and pouring a lot of money into their projects. Unfortunately, there is no way to control how and when results are delivered. Briefly: the problem is to measure the success of these instruments in concrete and direct results.
I suggest a different way of thinking: That fragmentation is useful, because people use it to put the pieces together to achieve their goal. Therefore, the focus on creating policy instruments should be on the process how people put the pieces together rather than combating the final states of fragmentation or integration. Going for the final state, policies are bound to fail, because the simple observation is that people or their organisations use fragments simultaneously to achieve their goals. Thus, fragmentation is useful.
Instead of seeing fragmentation and integration as mutually exclusive states, policy makers should focus on how to help people mobilise the pieces more productively in the direction of their own goal.
This way of thinking is about flow: how people go about their daily activities to achieve their goal in a world that is seamlessly interconnected. Therefore, policy making is about providing access: to knowledge, capital, laboratories, scientists, media attention, etc. An example: a scientist knows that by participating in a European project he will access knowledge even in competitor’s research lab, capital to pursue his own research, hire new phd’s and publish. Policy makers would then create a neutral space, where participants in the scientific project will be open to share knowledge. In this knowledge commons, tools from science, policy and business will be used to leverage the tacit knowledge in individuals, distant and inaccessible in a fragmented world.
Thinking of the process of mobilising the pieces can actually make policy work in a knowledge-based society.
Innovation policy – how to make it work
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