Research on mission-oriented policy is moving from concepts to evaluation

The OECD’s Mission Forward conference in Vienna brought together the people who design and run missions. Our contribution asked what the academic literature behind that practice looks like: who writes it, who cites whom, and what it is about. With M. Paiva, J. M. F. Maia and E. A. D. Moresi, we searched Scopus and Web of Science for work on mission-oriented research and innovation policy, transformative innovation policy and challenge-led innovation policy, and added documents from the OECD’s collection and from expert knowledge. The analysis covered 770 documents.

The first finding is growth. The sample held 42 documents published in 2018, 127 in 2023 and 139 in the months of 2024 before the conference. The co-citation network shows where this literature draws from: the economics of innovation, socio-technical transitions and the geography of innovation, with the Mission-Oriented Policy Observatory and a Chinese perspective as distinct groups. In the main co-authorship network (198 of 1,912 authors), the most cited are not always the most central; other researchers hold the links between clusters. The network also appears to be moving from a brokered structure to a modular one, as related bodies of knowledge converge and the field diversifies. Semantic analysis of titles and abstracts sorts the documents into four clusters: mission-oriented R&D, transformative innovation policy, mission-oriented innovation policy, and a critique of mission-oriented policy.

My argument at the talk went beyond the slides. Publications will keep growing, but the kind of work will change. The first phase was devoted to conceptualisation: defining missions, distinguishing them from earlier technology programmes, and debating their limits. The next phase will be empirical, a phase of evaluation, both quantitative and through case studies, as the missions launched in recent years produce results that can be assessed.

My own work since then has gone in that direction: a formative evaluation of Vinnova’s transformative missions in the food system, written with J. Schot, D. Velasco and J. Molas-Gallart, and a comparison of two subprogrammes of Brazil’s Inova programme with M. Mazzucato and G. Santos, published this year in Policy Design and Practice. The results shown in Vienna were preliminary and have not been updated, so the shift in the literature as a whole remains to be measured. The network analysis also left an open question: how to foster collaboration and the exchange of knowledge between these clusters.