Innovation policies and new regional growth paths

Fundamental and enduring changes brought about by recurrent economic and financial crises, the digital revolution and ongoing globalisation processes of production and innovation activities are posing major challenges for regional and national economies to renew their industrial structures and develop innovations that break existing development trajectories. This calls for new innovation policy approaches that are well equipped to support transformation processes towards new industrial growth paths. This chapter aims to provide the conceptual underpinnings for such a reorientation of innovation policy. We take an innovation system (IS) perspective and develop a comprehensive place-based system failure framework for an innovation policy design that is suitable to promote structural change in different region-specific contexts.