ABSTRACT
Behind the bold rhetoric of “intervention” or “deregulation” that has accompanied the attempts of West European governments to stimulate technological innovation in the last decade is secreted a rich story of failed ambitions, confusion, muddle and incoherence. Nevertheless, some lessons about state policy and techno-industrial innovation can be derived from this experience. Firstly, new technology policies provide a lesson about the pressures for, and the limitations on, state action. The result is a profound ambiguity in attitudes towards public policy. On the one hand, state action is wanted to create new markets (e.g. by public procurement or by agreeing international standards) and to share the burden of high and mounting research and development costs (e.g. by taxation or expenditure measures); on the other hand, the state is beset by external pressures and internal problems of coordination that make unified action difficult, if not impossible to achieve. For West European governments, of Left and of Right, new technology policies have been a learning process about the
needs, complexities and limitations of state action. Secondly, the search for the role of the state in technological innovation distracts attention from the prevalence of change and uncertainty in public policy. On examination a shifting kaleidoscope of roles emerges, conditional on such factors as governmental ideology and sectoral characteristics and on newly emerging knowledge. In particular, the specific “micropolitics” of the firm and of the sector stand out as significant, for instance when a certain corporation or trade association emerges as a key beneficiary of government action. Thirdly, over time public policy has a tendency to become bound up in the phenomenon of unintended consequences, whether of government’s own past actions or of corporate or market behaviour. In other words, the “reactive” characteristics of public policy are ascendant. Public policy becomes driven by “threat avoidance”. Governments learn to be more modest and “workmanlike” in style, thus reducing their exposure to difficulties and better safeguarding reputation. Public action comes to prefer less visible forms.
