Customized innovation policies and the regions: digital content services and intelligent machinery in Finland

This paper poses the question of whether innovation policies are customized to meet the varying needs of different regions and industries. The research questions are: (a) are the investigated innovation initiatives context sensitive and customized to the prevailing innovation problems and, hence, to what extent do they focus on overcoming specific bottlenecks in the particular regional innovation system and address system failures hampering innovation; (b) have innovation policies aiming to support specific industries recognized the differences and, if yes, have they been customized accordingly? The paper discusses emerging forms of local/regional innovation policy using, as cases in point, Finland and especially two different industries (intelligent machinery and digital content services) in three different kinds of regional innovation system. The empirical research is based on data gathered (a) through 40 interviews with Finnish innovation policy makers and (b) through 91 structured interviews with firm representatives; (c) in addition, interview data from another study with 53 national-level innovation policy makers are exploited. The empirical analysis shows that, in spite of a shared understanding about the generic principles of the innovation policy and the investigated local/regional policy, initiatives are clearly customized to serve the current challenges of the specific regions and industries.