The challenge of coordination and mission-oriented innovation policy - the case of Norway

In recent years mission-oriented innovation policy have increasingly been suggested as an approach to solve grand challenges. In practice, this involves developing specific missions that introduce a directionality which should then guide future policy development, governance, and innovation activities. However, recent empirical contributions suggest that missions often become too vague or too narrow to set the direction needed. As a result, recent contributions to the literature highlight that missions are developed and translated in policy processes characterised by contestation and negotiation and that a level of coordination and clear direction is needed in the initial mission development, the formulation phase, for missions to be a successful approach for solving grand challenges. Still, few have studied how this may be achieved in practice. Drawing on two theoretical perspectives this paper identifies six potential barriers to coordination in policy processes in general and study how they influence a policy process that aims to develop missions in a Norwegian context. The findings of this paper indicate that all but one of the identified barriers (turf protective behaviour, reputation, blame avoidance, selective perception, capacity and information) influenced the policy process in several ways. Consequently, they need to be taken into account in policy processes that aims to develop missions. In addition, the findings also show that if and how a barrier actually influences a policy process is highly context dependent and depends on the unit of analysis studied. The whole policy process, a group of proposals or a specific proposal.