Preface This book is a revised and updated version of a report published in Danish in the autumn of 1999 (the DISKO report). That report was addressed to policymakers and to other students of innovation policy in Denmark and it brought together the results of a big interdisciplinary project on the 'Danish innovation and competence-building system in comparative perspective'. The project started in January 1996 and was financed by the Danish Agency for Trade and Industry. When the report was

more »

... ished in the autumn of 1999 it was presented at a seminar where leading representatives of eight national agencies (covering respectively industrial policy, economic policy, competition policy, labour market policy, vocational training, education policy, science policy and technology policy) were given an opportunity to comment on the analysis in the report and its policy recommendations. On the basis of the report and the discussion at the seminar, the Danish Agency for Trade and Industry worked out a policy memorandum for the government where many of the recommendations from the report were included. Less than a year later the Danish government presented its new plan for industrial development -dk 21 -to mark the new millennium. The most striking feature of dk 21 was that no less than eight ministries were involved in its preparation and responsible for its realization. Some of the recommendations in the DISKO report appear in the plan while others do not. And, of course, there are elements in dk 21 which have nothing to do with the DISKO project and also elements that go against the logic in the DISKO report. These typically reflected the IT, high-tech and NASDAQ euphorias that reigned everywhere at that time. Even so, it is obvious that this was a process of close interaction between academic research and policy learning from which certain lessons may be drawn. The first lesson is that in the new context of the learning economy there is a need for research that combines approaches from different disciplines and for research that goes across traditional sector boundaries. One of the major problems of policy-making in the new context of globalization and rapid change is that the sharp division of responsibilities among ministries and authorities makes it impossible to develop coherent strategies to cope with the new challenges. And the organization of policy research tends to follow the dividing lines of the policy world: often it is the case that each ministry has its own community of researchers connected to it. Labour market expertise does xiv Bengt-Åke Lundvall -9781781008348