*Originally published in 2025 and preserved as part of our archive project.Get E-International Relations delivered directly to your inbox, free of charge. As you sign up, consider becoming a paid subscriber to support our work.

Over the past few years, geopolitical competition has been increasing, and this competition has become largely technology-based (OECD 2023). In an innovation system that is highly globally intertwined, this raises a complex dilemma for governments (see Table 1). On the one hand, maximally integrating into these systems enhances innovation and therefore competitiveness and the ability to address societal challenges such as climate change, but it increases risks of weaponized interdependence when becoming too dependent on adversarial states. On the other hand, closing off and securitizing innovation grants more autonomy, but risks running behind in international technology-based competition when not being able to reap the benefits of open knowledge flows, interactions, and learning about the most advanced technologies (Tan et al. 2025; Edler et al. 2023; Lee et al. 2024).

This question touches directly on the academic fields of International Relations (IR) and studies. It is therefore increasingly being studied by related academic communities in Europe, such as the Eu-SPRI forum (innovation policy) and EISA-PEC (IR). As a PhD Candidate in innovation policy with a background in IR, I visited both their conferences this summer to see how the two communities approach this question and, more importantly, what they can learn from each other.

The European Forum for Studies of Policies for Research and Innovation (Eu-SPRI Forum) represents a research field evolving since the 1960s at the encounter of economics, political science, sociology, Science and Technology Studies (STS), business administration, geography, and history. Historically, the field has focused on two rationales or ‘frames’ for engaging in innovation policy, the first being addressing market failures. Examples are uncertainty about outcomes and short investment horizons, which lead to a chronic undersupply of private R&D funding, with companies tending to favor easily applicable, incremental innovation over fundamental research with greater potential for radical breakthroughs. After the Second World War, during the early Cold War, Western governments started institutionalizing supply-side innovation policies to fix such market failures. Popular instruments are R&D subsidies or tax credits for knowledge-intensive companies, which remain the cornerstone of many present innovation policies, also, for example, in the Draghi report on the European Union’s (EU) competitiveness. Towards the end of the Cold War, the focus expanded to a second frame: creating competitive national innovation systems in a globalizing world by addressing system failures, such as weak university-industry links, which impede the commercialization of research. Various models emerged to assess how interactions between different actors shape innovation and to identify gaps governments can address, including the university-industry-government ‘Triple Helix’ model (Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff 2000), (technological) innovation systems (TIS) (Hekkert et al. 2007), and entrepreneurial ecosystems (Stam 2015). Staying in the Netherlands, an example can be found in Brainport Eindhoven, grouping Eindhoven University of Technology with high-tech companies like ASML, currently at the heart of global technology-based competition.

Since the mid-2010s, the field has expanded its focus to a third frame, not only studying how to facilitate R&D investments and innovation systems, but also how to actively create and support markets for promising innovations, steering demand towards addressing societal challenges such as climate change and healthcare in times of an aging population (Schot and Steinmueller 2018; Weber and Rohracher 2012; Mazzucato 2016). For instance, governments can act as lead customers for green innovations by incorporating such innovations in their public procurements or using regulations and standards to raise the bar and direct innovations towards specific policy goals (Edler and Georghiou 2007). These three frames for innovation policy, until recently, all focused on a situation displayed by the upper left quadrant of Table 1, i.e., reaping the benefits of global knowledge exchange and........

© E-International