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“It should also be noted that the objective of convergence and equal distribution, including across under-performing areas, can hinder efforts to generate growth. Contrariwise, the objective of competitiveness can exacerbate regional and social inequalities, by targeting efforts on zones of excellence where projects achieve greater returns (dynamic major cities, higher levels of general education, the most advanced projects, infrastructures with the heaviest traffic, and so on). If cohesion policy and the Lisbon Strategy come into conflict, it must be borne in mind that the former, for the moment, is founded on a rather more solid legal foundation than the latter” European Commission (2005, p. 9)Adaptation of Cohesion Policy to the Enlarged Europe and the Lisbon and Gothenburg Objectives.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the historical trends and status of the national development of artificial intelligence (AI) from a nationwide perspective and to enable governments at different administrative levels to promote AI development through policymaking.

This paper analyzed 248 Chinese AI policies (36 issued by the state agencies and 212 by the regional agencies). Policy bibliometrics, policy instruments and network analysis were used to reveal the AI policy patterns. Three aspects were analyzed: the spatiotemporal distribution of issued policies, the policy foci and instruments of policy contents and the cooperation and citation among policy-issuing agencies.

Results indicate that Chinese AI development is still in the initial phase. During the policymaking processes, the state and regional policy foci have strong consistency; however, the coordination among state and regional agencies is supposed to be strengthened. According to the issuing time of AI policies, Chinese AI development is in accordance with the global situation and has witnessed unprecedented growth in the last five years. And the coastal provinces have issued more targeted policies than the middle and western provinces. Governments at the state and regional levels have emphasized familiar policy foci and played the role of policymakers, along with regional governments that also functioned as policy executors as well. According to the three-dimension instruments coding, the authors found an uneven structure of policy instruments at both levels. Furthermore, weak cooperation appears at the state level, while little cooperation is found among regional agencies. Regional governments cite state policies, thus leading to the formation of top-down diffusion, lacking bottom-up diffusion.

The paper contributes to the literature by characterizing policy patterns from both external attributes and semantic contents, thus revealing features of policy distribution, contents and agencies. What is more, this research analyzes Chinese AI policies from a nationwide perspective, which contributes to clarifying the overall status and multi-level relationships of policies. The findings also benefit the coordinated development of governments during further policymaking processes.

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are currently showing an increasingly open innovation (OI) approach. Public policies supporting the adoption of OI by SMEs are becoming a priority for policymakers. Therefore, the aim of this article is to contribute to the literature by mapping scholars' policy recommendations for implementing OI among SMEs.

The authors conducted a systematic review of the literature (SRL) on the topic to achieve this purpose. A total of 99 academic articles were selected from the Web of Science and Scopus databases to suggest the main scholars' policy recommendations to implement OI among SMEs.

Results indicated that scholars' policy recommendations for OI adoption in SMEs can be organized into: research and development (R&D), networking, collaboration, knowledge and intellectual property rights (IPR), ecosystem, managerial capabilities, funding and incentives and sustainability policies.

Only relevant articles about this topic have been included due to the reliance on the interpretations of the authors. The analysis of the literature revealed that the authors did not always distinguish policies dedicated to SMEs and those dedicated to large companies. Moreover, policies are not matched according to each OI dimensions (e.g. inbound, outbound and coupled OI).

The article uses a systematic literature review method that combines qualitative and quantitative analyses. This method contributes to theoretical development of OI policies dedicated, in particular to SMEs. This paper also provides policymakers and researchers with insights on the scope of OI policies that could support economic growth.

As an important part of national governance, the online communication of education policies usually attracts the attention of many subjects, including the public and the media. Existing research mainly focuses on analysing communication behaviour of a single subject. However, with the rapid development of social media, policy information communication is often accompanied by the participation of multiple subjects and forms diversified communication behaviours and interaction patterns. The comprehensive identification of multiple subjects and their interactions can accurately depict the communication process and effectively support the efficient communication of policies. Therefore, this paper aims to conduct fine-grained analysis on the multiple subjects in information communication of the education policy.

This paper explored the communication and interaction process of the education policy via multidimensional analysis. Specifically, the authors firstly obtained multi-source communication data to identify key communication subjects. Secondly, the authors mined the communication contents generated by communication subjects to measure the diversified correlations between subjects. Finally, the authors depicted the interaction of subjects in policy information communication.

The experimental results reveal that there are multiple key subjects in the policy information communication, and the communication roles of the subjects change with the communication process, including dominance role, one-way or two-way effect role. This further indicates the need to allocate resources dynamically in the process of policy communication.

Analysing the process of policy communication and identifying the dynamic interaction between communication subjects can provide more a comprehensive and detailed decision-making basis for policy formulation and implementation. In addition, the research ideas and methods presented in this paper expand the perspective of information communication research.

Policy analysis derives from a long tradition of assessing the activities of government. The most sophisticated analyses are distinguished by their concern to identify linkages between variables that represent causes and effects of social conditions, or the impacts to be expected from policy details. Inherent in their sophistication are methodological choices which invite dispute. Because of the controversies they generate, such analyses may contribute more to the knowledge about policy making than to the support of policy options.

The purpose of this paper is to present a composite framework for critical policy analysis drawing from discourse analysis and post-structuralist analysis. Drawing on an interpretive paradigm (Yanow, 2014), this paper provides a thick description (Geertz, 1973) of the processes involved in the application of these tools in a critical policy analysis project, focusing on disability policy within the Irish context. Methodologically, this is a resourceful cross-fertilization of analytical tools to interrogate policy, highlighting its potential within critical disability policy analysis and beyond.

Merging a critical discourse analysis framework and a policy problematization approach, the combination of tools presented here, along with their associated processes, is referred to as the critical discourse problematization framework.

Potentially, the framework can also be employed across a number of cognate social policy fields including education, welfare and social justice.

The value of this paper lies in its potential to be used within analytical practice in the field of critical (disability) policy work by offering an evaluation of the analytical tools and theoretical framework deployed and modeled across an entire research process.

The framework has the potential and has been used successfully as a tool for disability activism to influence policy development.

The analytical framework presented here is a methodically innovative approach to the study of policy analysis, marrying two distinct analytical tools to form a composite framework for the study of policy text.

The purpose of this paper is to examine Nick Moore’s information policy matrix and how it has been used by Moore and others.

This study involved secondary search and a bibliographic study of the impact Moore’s work has had on other authors.

It is clear that there have been two quite separate trains of research in information policy, one in the USA and one in Europe, and that it appears from the literature that there is limited awareness of each other’s work. Focusing on the UK and European research, the papers the authors inspected that report information policy analyses make no mention of Moore’s work. It could be argued that Moore’s matrix is too simplistic for such a complex topic as information policy, but it may also be the case that there is a lack of awareness of how the matrix can be used in policy analysis as Moore’s published papers were general descriptions of the matrix, reported the findings of his analyses or suggested policy goals. Moore did not publish theoretical or methodological papers to explain how to go about policy analysis using his matrix.

This study is based on secondary research and bibliographic analysis. Furthermore, primary research could have revealed deeper insights into use and impact of Moore’s framework by analysts and policy makers.

The paper highlights potential opportunities for international collaboration on information policy research, to explore more deeply theoretical models that could be used to underpin policy analysis as well as the potential value of Moore’s matrix.

Academic research into entrepreneurship policy is particularly interesting due to the increasing relevance of the topic and since knowledge about the evolution of themes in this field is still rather limited. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the key concepts, topics, trends and shifts that have shaped the entrepreneurship policy research agenda during the period 1990–2016.

This paper uses text mining techniques, cluster analysis and complementary bibliographic data to examine the evolution of a corpus of 1,048 academic papers focused on entrepreneurship-related policies and published during the period 1990–2016 in ten relevant journals. In particular, the paper follows a standard text mining workflow: first, as text is unstructured, content requires a set of pre-processing tasks and then a stemming process. Then, the paper examines the most repeated concepts within the corpus, considering the whole period 1990–2016 and also in five-year terms. Finally, the paper conducts a k-means clustering to divide the collection of documents into coherent groups with similar content. The analyses in the paper also include geographical particularities considering three regional sub-corpora, distinguishing those articles authored in the European Union (EU), the USA and South and Eastern Asia, respectively.

Results of the analysis show that inclusion, employment and regulation-related papers have largely dominated the research in the field, evolving from an initial classical approach to the relationship between entrepreneurship and employment to a wider, multidisciplinary perspective, including the relevance of management, geographies and narrower topics such as agglomeration economics or internationalisation instead of the previous generic sectorial approaches. The text mining analysis also reveals how entrepreneurship policy research has gained increasing attention and has become both more open, with a growing cooperation among researchers from different affiliations, and more sophisticated, with concepts and themes that moved the research agenda forward, closer to the priorities of policy implementation.

The paper identifies main trends and research gaps in the field of entrepreneurship policy providing actionable knowledge by presenting the spectrum of both over-explored and understudied research themes in the field. In practical terms the results of the text mining analysis can be interpreted as a compass to navigate the entrepreneurship policy research agenda.

The paper presents the heterogeneity of topics under research in the field, reinforcing the concept of entrepreneurship as a multidisciplinary and dynamic domain. Therefore, the definition and adoption of a certain policy agenda in entrepreneurship should consider multiple aspects (needs, objectives, stakeholders, expected outputs, etc.) to be comprehensive and aligned with its complexity. In addition, the paper shows how text mining techniques could be used to map the research activity in a particular field, contributing to the challenge of linking research and policy.

The exploratory nature of text mining allows us to obtain new knowledge and reveals hidden patterns from large quantities of documents/text data, representing an opportunity to complement other qualitative reviews. In this sense, the main value of this paper is not to advise on the future configuration of entrepreneurship policy as a research topic, but to unwrap the past by unveiling how key themes of the entrepreneurship policy research agenda have emerged, evolved and/or declined over time as a foundation on which to build further developments.

Stakeholders and their organizations are increasingly involved in governance of higher education, not only within institutions or at system level, but also in various supra-national and intergovernmental processes. For these, as well as pragmatic reasons (ease of access and relatively simple methods for analysis), this chapter advocates for a more systematic approach to studying stakeholder organizations, their participation in and impact on governance of higher education. Specifically, the chapter: (1) provides a three-fold nested conceptualization of policy positions of stakeholder organizations, comprising issues, preferences concerning these issues, and the normative basis utilized to legitimize said preferences; (2) presents advantages and disadvantages of different methodological approaches to analyzing policy positions of stakeholder organizations, including qualitative and quantitative content analysis, employing either human coding or computer-assisted coding of policy documents; and (3) highlights different insights one can gain from analyzing policy positions of stakeholder organizations. It combines (thus far limited) insights from higher education studies with the more generic literature on interest groups, and uses examples from European level stakeholder organizations to illustrate its points.