Industrial development centres (IDCs) as a regional innovation tool: Comparing policy practices in Finspång, Sweden and in the Hunter Valley, Australia

Abstract

SummaryThis article analyses what happens when policy-makers use and implement their policy concepts and their knowledge of regional innovation and economic development within their regional contexts. Our focus is on the policy implementation phase, especially the implications of how policy-makers and firms, in different institutional settings, interpret similar policy concepts in different ways. The regional innovation policy concept explored is the conceptual idea of Industrial Development Centres (IDCs), which constitutes an example of an innovation support organisation. This policy concept was investigated through an empirical study of two cases, namely an IDC in Finspång, Sweden and an IDC in Hunter Valley, Australia.The results from the study showed that even though policy concepts in different regions may appear on the surface to be identical, the implementation of concepts into practise still differ in significant ways. Furthermore, the context of policy practise redefined the meanings of the abstract concepts, and thereby contributed to the different outcomes. The article outlined four dimensions across which the context influences policy practice, given that policy implementation is part of the process of regional development. Accordingly, significant differences in the policy outcome were due to deep-rooted differences in the policy-makers’ interpretation of abstract explanations to their specific regional context and what kind of role policy could play in regional economic development.This article thus contributes to the debates over industrial policy outcomes, including evaluations of the means, goals and results of innovation policy. Our argument is that the links between the operationalisation of concepts, the local context of policy practise, and the resulting policy outcomes must be explicitly analysed in regional innovation policy.