Auteurs : Jan Larosse
Publicatiedatum : december 2004

This Study is the first part of the contribu-tion of IWT to the OECD-Monit project and describes the policy profile of the Flemish Innovation System. The second part, presen-ting a case-study on the integration of inno-vation policy and environmental policy in Flanders, is published in another volume in this series.

The Flemish Innovation System has emerged from the decentralised Belgian Science and Innovation System as an autonomous system in the nineties of last century, after the devolution of power to the regions on most legal competences in sciences and technolo-gical innovation and the subsequent esta-blishment of key institutions and instru-ments to manage the interactions of the actors in the Flemish system.

The conceptual framework of ‘national innovation systems’, that received an impor-tant impulse with the conceptual work of OECD, serves now as a reference for policy development. The Monit project has stres-sed the importance of innovation gover-nance - the role and involvement of all actors - in the knowledge driven society to fully exploit the leverage of systemic approaches to innovation policy. The ‘hori-zontal integration’ of innovation policy and other policy domains, as is studied in this project, is key to ‘Third Generation innova-tion policies’ because policy integration is a necessary component of systemic innovation policy that mobilises all resources and puts innovation at the agenda of all domains that articulate societal demand.

Innovation governance in Flanders is moving towards a Third Generation innovation policy, starting from a technology push model in the eighties over the full-scale development of science and innovation stimulation in the nineties towards further integration of policy domains at this point in time. S&T-policy has gone through an important catching-up process on the level of R&D activities. But the evolution of the Flemish innovation system has also created rather diverging dynamics that have produced a mismatch between the scientific and industrial specialisations. This is a specific small country problem, because globalisation is influencing the different components of the system in different ways. The challenge for managing the innovation system as the most important asset to anchor economic and social welfare to the territory of Flanders is to combine the impact of globalisation with regional path-dependencies in the development of existing and new clusters of specialisation that are competitive and respond also to social priorities that are widely shared.

Innovation governance therefore is at the heart of economic and social renewal in Flanders. The Pact of Vilvoorde (2001) has laid the foundations of a new social contract of the 21st century, in line with the Lisbon targets of the EU, to be among the leading knowledge economies. The Innovation Pact (2003) has specified the commitment of the innovation actors to the knowledge intensification of the Flemish economy and society, with the adoption of the 3% target. In the recent period several strategic platforms (‘Excellence Poles’) were set-up in domains that are important for future development to stimulate research and networking. The new Innovation Platform for Environmental Technology strongly emphasises coordination of departments and their policy instruments, both at the supply and the demand side of the new market of environmental technologies. So innovation policy contributes to new innovation governance, but it needs to go through a self-renewal process to be capable to serve the transition of the Flemish Innovation System to the new knowledge economy. The nder-development of the policy planning cycle and the ‘strategic intelligence’ of policy making are bottlenecks for the role of government as a catalysator for this transition.

This study has served the MONIT-project for international comparative work on new innovation governance and policy integration. It is meant to start further discussions and research on the Flemish Innovation System and the development of the innovation policy domain.