Innovation bureaucracies: How agile stability creates the entrepreneurial state

Paper by Rainer Kattel, Wolfgang Drechsler and Erkki Karo: “In this paper, we offer to redefine what entrepreneurial states are: these are states that are capable of unleashing innovations, and wealth resulting from those innovations, and of maintaining socio-political stability at the same time. Innovation bureaucracies are constellations of public organisations that deliver such agile stability. Such balancing acts make public bureaucracies unique in how they work, succeed and fail. The paper looks at the historical evolution of innovation bureaucracy by focusing on public organisations dealing with knowledge and technology, economic development and growth. We briefly show how agility and stability are delivered through starkly different bureaucratic organisations; hence, what matters for capacity and capabilities are not individual organisations, but organisational configurations and how they evolve….(More)”.