The evolution of the national innovation system as programmatic policy idea in Finland

摘要

This article studies the idea of a national innovation system (NIS) as a policy program. Previousresearch has addressed NIS as a policy idea in the context of expert discourse or as normativeframes in policy discourse. The idea has not yet been studied as a policy program that explicitlycoordinates public policymaking. In this article, we study the programmatic idea of NIS and itsstatus and impacts in the coordination discourses of Finnish policymaking in 1990–2019. We findthat the idea of NIS was omnipresent in Finnish policy programs of the 1990s and 2000s, but lostits programmatic status in the 2010s. We show how Finnish policymakers explicitly deployed theidea to prescribe budget allocations and new legislation. The findings suggest that the idea wasgiven a tangible but, compared with the breadth of the idea, relatively narrow role in coordinatingpublic policy.