160out the entire public sector. Innovation policy presents no exception. Here, this policy area is amply funded as state grants only (not counting E.U., regional, and local investments) amount to more than €1 billion annually (Karlson et al., 2019). In Evaluating Evaluations of Innovation Policy: Exploring Reliability,. . .

161the United States, these figures have been gauged to be above $13 billion (Hunt & Kiefer, 2017). As stated, evaluation can be conducted in several different ways, none of which is by default superior. However, once one has decided upon an evaluating policy and what to actually evaluate within each specific intervention, certain methods may be more preferred. Our initial premonition, supported, for instance, by an audit made by The Swedish National Audit Office (Swedish NAO) (2020), was that evaluative practices and judgment calls varied somewhat between evaluative actors. Here, the Audit Office states that “there are considerable weaknesses in the effect evaluations of industrial policy that have been carried out by government agencies: only 2 out of 37 studied evaluations fulfill all three elementary criteria set up by the NAO regarding credible evaluations” (2020, p. 4).

Apart from the report from the Swedish NAO, other studies provide initial concern. A few rather thorough research reports based on counter-factual methods contradict the otherwise quite favorable picture of the output of policies within the field and point to a lack of effects on firm turnover, number of employees, profits, or productivity (Daunfeldt et al., 2016; Gustavsson Tingvall & Deiaco, 2015).

4

Results

Innovation policy in Sweden is mainly organized through a few big, self-governing, state agencies, as is typical for Swedish public administration. Agencies such as Vinnova (the Swedish Innovation Agency), Tillväxtverket (the Swedish Agency for Economic and Regional Growth), and Energimyndigheten (the Swedish Energy Agency) are in charge of the lion’s share of allocated resources.