Chapter 3: How do New Innovation Paradigms Challenge Current Innovation Policy Perspectives?

Successful firms today are forced to deal with new competitive realities by being globally present, innovatively resourceful and internationally competitive on multiple markets across the world. The new competitive realities challenge firms to open their innovation processes by adopting new innovation paradigms such as user-driven innovation, open innovation and value co-creation. The user-driven and open innovation paradigms have already become the subject of extensive research and are currently discussed in terms of their potential implications for policy development. The value cocreation paradigm is relatively new, but with a significant potential to also affect formulation of new innovation policy perspectives. The three paradigms are considered as examples of distributive innovation, which is based on the need of firms to orchestrate and integrate the innovative contributions from multiple actors by managing knowledge sharing processes across entire value networks. The chapter provides a brief description and comparison of these new innovation paradigms and discusses the challenges that these paradigms imply for existing innovation policies. The innovation policy recommendations are based on insights derived from the analysis of innovation policy development in Denmark. The “triadic” approach of the new innovation paradigms suggested here will benefit the discussion of the innovation policy issues and challenges associated with the adoption of the three new paradigms in other countries than the discussed exemplary case.