ABSTRACT
At this point we shall revisit the questions posed in the introduction and try to find answers to them on the basis of the case studies which form the book. Indeed, in the beginning of the book we laid out four sets of questions. Firstly, we want to see how policies have changed in the cases that the authors in this book have studied. The main question, as stated in the introduction, concerned how the new ideas have been absorbed by the institutional set-up of the respective systems. Informed by the neoinstitutional literature on path-dependency phenomena and institutional inertia, we are interested in the way changes in RTD policy were brought about during the 1990s. Our questions relate to whether the new paradigm has been perceived as an alternative or complementary to the previous paradigm of technology policy, to the viability of the new ideas in the institutional set-up, and whether the policy change has been shallow or deep.
