Policy Instruments and Policy Mixes for Innovation: Analysing Their Relation to Grand Challenges, Entrepreneurship and Innovation Capability with Natural Language Processing and Latent Variable Methods

In recent decades, both the relevance of innovation for economic development and the scope of innovation policy have expanded, adding to the complexity of innovation policy mixes that comprise broad ranges of policy instruments. In parallel, how innovation policy can contribute to achieving the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and solving grand challenges has received widespread attention both in policy circles and the academic community. In the three papers of this dissertation, I engage with these major trends and present novel approaches to characterising innovation policy instruments and innovation policy mixes. My analyses shed light on the design of policy instruments for grand challenges, on policy mixes in support of innovative entrepreneurship, and on the structural profiles of national innovation policy mixes. I approach each of these topics by identifying and further analysing latent patterns in thousands of innovation policy instruments from over 50 countries, drawing on a new and unique database on innovation policy instruments and using natural language processing and latent variable methods.