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For at least the last 10 years, the Russian authorities have been declaring the need to move to an innovative path of economic development. The government actively initiates and applies various instruments and measures to promote innovation. However, the effectiveness of the Russian innovation policy is still in question. The chapter examines the evolution of state policy to foster innovation growth in Russia since 2000 and describes some sets of achievements and problems for different stages of this policy. In addition to analysis of changes in the innovation sphere at the macro-level, we discuss the primary motivations and limitations at the micro-level (firm level). As a result, the critical institutional barriers to innovation-based growth are revealed. In the same time, certain successes have been achieved in some sectors, and we consider various opportunities to improve Russian technological and innovation policy.

The European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) calls for far-reaching changes to the way economic activity will occur in EU digital markets. Before its remedies are imposed, it is critical to assess their impacts on individual markets, the digital sector, and the overall European economy. The European Commission (EC) released an Impact Assessment in support of the DMA that purports to evaluate it using cost/benefit analysis.

An economic evaluation of the DMA should consider its full impacts on dynamic competition. The Impact Assessment neither assesses the DMA's impact on dynamic competition in the digital economy nor evaluates the impacts of specific DMA prohibitions and obligations. Instead, it considers benefits in general and largely ignores costs. We study its benefit assessments and find they are based on highly inappropriate methodologies and assumptions. A cost/benefit study using inappropriate methodologies and largely ignoring costs cannot provide a sound policy assessment.

Instead of promoting dynamic competition between platforms, the DMA will likely reinforce existing market structures, ossify market boundaries, and stunt European innovation. The DMA is likely to chill R&D by encouraging free riding on the investments of others, which discourages making those investments. Avoiding harm to innovation is critical because innovation delivers large, positive spillover benefits, driving increases in productivity, employment, wages, and prosperity.

The DMA prioritizes static over dynamic competition, with the potential to harm the European economy. Given this, the Impact Assessment does not demonstrate that the DMA will be beneficial overall, and its implementation must be carefully tailored to alleviate or lessen its potential to harm Europe’s economic performance.

In the last decade the discussion on green innovations has gained in importance, both in practice and in academia. This chapter builds on the idea that performance in innovation capturing environmental aspects doesn’t depend only on inputs but also the synchronization of different stakeholders, firms and policy-makers that make an innovation-driven society. In disruptive periods, green adaptive ability which refers to ability to comply with environmental regulations is based on corporate environmental commitments and their social responsibility as well as on green human capital. Based on corporate environmental commitments, companies seek business opportunities by changing their business models as well as by integrating, building and reconfiguring competences to comply with environmental standards. Green human capital, on the other side, builds organizational culture that supports green innovation. The aim of this chapter is to present a conceptual model that stimulates green innovations at the company level and discusses the proper governance structure supportive of innovation and effective strategies of policy-making.

Technological innovation in context has been studied by economists and sociologists of technical change and innovation. I shall present the insights and perspectives from this body of literature (including some of my own work), in order to highlight the dynamics of technological innovation processes and the possibilities to influence them — by managers, as well as governmental and societal actors. These actors often work with a limited view of the complexities of technological change and innovation, and they might do better if they were to use recent insights, as I have argued previously (Rip, 1995). Thus, a further topic, visible between the lines of my main exposé, is the relation between the “theory” — i.e., insights from social scientific studies — and the “practice” of policy or action.

This chapter evaluates the readiness of the higher education system to contribute to the competitiveness of African countries in the knowledge economy. Using institutions of higher learning in Kenya and Uganda as case studies, the study demonstrates that the higher education system in Africa is ill-equipped to fulfill the role of knowledge production for the advancement of African economies. The chapter proposed promising ways through which higher education in the region can play a more fulfilling role to the global knowledge economy through the formation of relevant skills for the growth of African economies. In an era where knowledge assets are accorded more importance than capital and labor assets, and where the economy relies on knowledge as the key engine of economic growth, this chapter argues that higher education institutions in Africa can assist in tackling the continent’s challenges through research in knowledge creation, dissemination, and utilization for improved productivity. These institutions need to engage in design-driven innovation in the emerging knowledge economy. To enhance their contributions toward human capital development and knowledge-intensive economies in the region, it is imperative to employ public-private initiatives to bridge and address various challenges and gaps facing universities and research institutions in Africa.

Within the last two decades, entrepreneurship education has become institutionalized in Germany. It is offered as a stand-alone program or as part of a business degree, combining academic knowledge, practical skills, and personal development to enhance the entrepreneurial success of university graduates. While entrepreneurship education has experienced similar growth worldwide, its emergence in Germany is closely tied to the country’s political and economic developments. The significance of entrepreneurship education for a thriving entrepreneurial ecosystem and contemporary economic policy has been instrumental in advancing its academic recognition. This chapter provides a historical analysis of the academization of entrepreneurship in Germany. It explores the recursive and often idiosyncratic processes involving state and financial institutions, companies, and universities that have created, respecified, and mutually reinforced a subdiscipline and field of study. Academic entrepreneurship knowledge successively not only became relevant for starting a business but also for employment within the entrepreneurial infrastructure and beyond. This chapter follows a chronological order, highlighting three key stages in the academization of entrepreneurship education. First, the academic, financial, and political roots (I) of entrepreneurship up until the 1970s. Second, it explores the transformation (II) of entrepreneurship into a viable policy alternative and the challenges faced in establishing complementary research and education in higher education institutions during the 1980s. Finally, it sketches the institutionalization (III) of entrepreneurship as a central driver of government economic policy, allowing for the late bloom of entrepreneurship education and research at universities around the turn of the millennium.