Collaborative Governance, Participation, and Leadership in National Innovation Systems

Although it was not planned as a thematic or symposium issue, this issue of the journal in fact does have common themes running through its peer-reviewed papers and case studies. These lend unusual coherence to this issue of the journal; they may attest to a developing consensus in innovation scholarship and practice.In "Negotiating collaborative governance designs," Plotnikof uses discursive and communicative analysis to examine the power relations shaping collaborative governance in the Danish public sector. The author does so, moreover, in a way that avoids analytical discontinuities across sectors, by stressing the emergence rather than creation of innovationgovernance regimes.In another Danish study, "Public Private Innovation in Healthcare," Aaroe Nissen considers public-private partnerships in the creation and commercialization of healthcare innovations. Here the stress is on the way that cross-sector innovation practices are defined, in moving from a 'not invented here' mindset to commercialization practice premised on the export of welfare innovations. This interpretive shift has loosened constraints on the diffusion of welfare innovations among Danish hospitals. The author suggests that the formation of innovation consortia would maximize participation along with knowledge generation and spillover. Such concertation would also allow smaller firms to gain from larger firms' access to knowledge network endowments, while larger firms would benefit from the innovativeness of small firms.A third paper, "Implementing strategic communications planning," coauthored by Weber, Backer, Orton, Barnes, Jenkins, and Crecy, is a study of the largest domestic agency in the Federal Government of the United States, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services- which historically has accounted for nearly a third of the annual federal budget. Specifically the authors-all DHHS practitioners in various capacities-consider the work of the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs (ASPA) in planning, implementing, evaluating, and improving innovation in print and digital communication products. ASPA relies on Strategic Communication Planning to this end, making use of evidence-based principles of change management and communications, guided by Everett Rogers' diffusion of innovations theory. The process turns on online technologies, outcomes-based accountability, and a cross-functional, cross-divisional, consultative approach. In an analog of the other papers' emphases on crosssector networks, this study describes the role of cross-unit partnerships in strategic communications. The entirety of the effort is a radical departure from extant practices at DHHS, marked as it is by sustained participation, consultation, and collaboration.The case study in the issue is concerned with complementary questions. In the study titled "Toward a national innovation strategy," author Smith Oduro-Marfo examines Ghana's narrow, government-centric, science and technology focused innovation policy and recommends its expansion to a national, cross-sector strategy that also encompasses 'non-science' innovation (for instance in education). The proposed national innovation strategy is intended to 'mainstream' public sector innovation while linking it to kindred initiatives in every sphere of civic life.Professor Hikel's review in this issue of Jingjing Huo, How Nations Innovate, frames the limitations and possibilities of these national innovation initiatives. Inertial forces-what institutional economists call hysteresis-in the form of prevailing power configurations and customary attitudes toward change stifle innovation. …