Neoliberalism, Innovation Bureaucracies and the Reinvention Of Missions

This chapter recounts that the end of the Cold War marked a fundamental shift in the global patterns of innovation policy making. It highlights that the 1990s became one of the main periods of de-contextualised or neoliberal innovation policies. In the 1990s, the shift in policy was based on the global spread and emulation of what has been labelled as Washington Consensus policies combined with new public management (NPM)-based approaches to reform innovation bureaucracies. The chapter talks about how the NPM was driven by the neoliberal desires to cut the state and pursue cost-efficiency and favoured the separation of small elites tasked with policy-level decision making from routine policy implementation. It looks at the concerns of competitiveness, which is a comparative notion that leads to international benchmarking and technocratic policy emulations.