161International Studies in Entrepreneurship 53, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94273-1_9 E. Collin et al.

158Introduction

Innovation policies have become increasingly popular over recent decades. The European Union, national governments, and regional agencies provide a collection of support systems and structures. Firms can apply for innovation grants, collaborative projects, training, and other types of public support. Billions of euros are made available for developing certain ex-ante chosen technologies, such as hydrogen gas or Artificial Intelligence applications. Inspired by scholars such as Mariana Mazzucato (2012, 2018), such public sector initiatives have grown in size and scope in recent years. This expansion of interventionist innovation policies has been followed by an equal growth in the number of evaluations of innovation policies. Little is yet known regarding these evaluations: Who performs these evaluations? What methods are employed in order to make evaluations? What conclusions are generally drawn? How are results, methods, and the kind of evaluator interrelated? Are evaluations reliable? With this chapter, we add a piece to the puzzle of innovation policy by analyzing a set of policy evaluations. Drawing upon a random sample of 110 innovation policy evaluations in Sweden from 2005 to 2019, we provide descriptive and multivariate statistics to answer the aforementioned questions. Our results show that the majority of evaluations are positive, many are neutral, and very few are negative. We also show that evaluations are often performed by private consulting firms. Based upon our results, we discuss issues concerning evaluators’ independence and potential conflicts of interest. Our study makes three contributions. First, our empirical analysis provides insights of relevance to both the innovation studies and program evaluation literatures by showing that policy evaluations may differ across different types of evaluative actors and across the distinct methods employed in their evaluations. Second, our focus on a whole body or corpus of evaluations in a specific policy domain provides a novel approach to studying evaluations in that previous studies have often offered commendable evaluations of specific policies or reforms, or metaevaluations—assessing the quality of certain evaluative projects—but a holistic approach to the evaluation area has, to our knowledge, hitherto been lacking within the fields of evaluation research and innovation policy. By examining connections between different types of evaluative actors, their methods, and their conclusions, the study facilitates a more in-depth understanding of how evaluating actors’ and their methods are related to results and recommendations from such evaluations. Third, our discussion regarding evaluators’ independence and potential conflicts of interest provides insights of broader relevance to academic and policy discussions about the role of evaluations in public policy.

The remainder of this chapter is organized as follows: The next section provides an overview of innovation policy evaluations and literature on evaluations. Next, we present and discuss our empirical data. Latterly, a concluding remark is provided.