Policy Innovation: building new regional strengths from old structures through cluster building

Sub-national regions have developed to the primary political arena for innovation and growth policies in Europe. Challenges such as globalisation and increased competition are assumed to be handled by new ways of acting, interacting and mobilising resources at the regional level. This paper deals with public sector entrepreneurship by highlighting how regional actors try to build new structures in an “old economy”, through new policy measures. Regional actors are assumed to play a greater and different role than previously, and public actors are more and more engaged in organising the output-side of economy. Innovation and cluster policies are pursued all over the world, but can be considered a ‘black-box’ of policy-making. The paper addresses questions of regional actors’ roles and “policy-ownership” in processes where public and private actors interact to face mutual challenges due to globalisation and increased competition. These forms of innovative policies are often analysed from an economic perspective and disregard potential political problems such as roles and ownership in these processes. Building on a case study of a region in Sweden the manifestation and effects of these out-put driven policies are illuminated. Through 23 interviews with actors involved in cluster governance, joint efforts to try to build new strengths from old structures in a region are investigated. The results show that the roles of the regional actors are diffuse and that questions of ownership may become problematic. There seems to be a conflict between private and public ownership of agenda-setting when the spheres are more and more intervened.