210TEKES spent €343 million on the program, approximately 40% of the total funding for the program. The Finnish concept was established around 2006 as a type of partnership between the public and private sectors. The stated purpose was to increase the pace of innovation and renew the Finnish business community by developing new skills and generating system-changing, radical innovations. This aim was, in turn, based on a report on Finland’s competitiveness, which sought to explore how the Finnish economy could cope in a world characterized by increasing transformational pressure. Finland is a small and open economy, so the report advocated a need to niche and prioritize resources toward more knowledge-intensive industries. It also stated that there was a need to improve the commercialization of research and development. More cross-border cooperation, more venture capital, and new platforms would, in theory, lead to enhanced competitiveness. The predecessor to SHOK was the initiatives launched in Finland in the wake of the deep crisis in the early 1990s. Once SHOK was initiated, its stated goal was to create research and clusters in Finland that are internationally competitive. The aim was that key actors in the innovation system were to dedicate their activities to stipulated goals, and that collaboration would increase at the regional level and at the same time attract human capital to Finland. The centers are declared to be founded to make a difference. The policy documents emphasize that resources need to be concentrated and focused on application in order to give Finland a comparative advantage in the targeted areas. In the evaluation of SHOK, it is shown that SHOK has a natural focus on large companies, which is partly at the expense of smaller companies. Furthermore, large companies have had limited incentives to engage in research that goes beyond current operations. In addition to this, they have relatively great autonomy. It is also clear that the international elements have been limited. Thus, SHOK also seems to have suffered from a lack of attention to the potential of emerging niche experiments and the inherent tendency to conserve and strengthen existing regimes.

4.3

Top Sectors in the Netherlands

The Top Sectors initiative in the Netherlands’ aims to strengthen cooperation between academia and the private sector in a total of nine sectors. Innovation policy in the Netherlands changed around 2012. Targeted subsidies and innovation support