Challenge-led Innovation Policy, Geopolitical uncertainty and Security (CIPGeS)

Project

The CIPGeS project connects analyses of the rapidly changing geopolitical and security context to future development of challenge-led innovation and growth policy. With challenge-led policy it refers to recent developments in mission-oriented and transformative policies that aim to address global grand challenges, such as climate change, nature loss and inequalities. CIPGeS supports innovation and growth capabilities of policymakers, firms and regions in Finland in this area, drawing from previous work on mission-oriented and transformative policies and examining innovation and growth policy from regional to EU scales.

CIPGeS is a collaboration between the Finnish Environment Institute, University of Helsinki, and Utrecht University. The team combines knowledge of sustainability transitions and challenge-led innovation policy with geopolitical and security studies. The project will provide policy briefs and training material for innovation policymakers and business actors in the rapidly changing area, including a guide how to assess geopolitical and security aspects in future innovation and industrial policymaking.

The project is funded by Business Finland.

Objectives

1. to analyse how the changing geopolitical context and developments influence the Finnish innovation environment and the formation of new challenge-led innovation policy;
2. to investigate how the existing and future innovation policies in the EU and Finland can address and respond to changing geopolitics, assessing policy impacts;
3. to explore how selected regions and companies in these regions in Finland perceive the geopolitical changes and may respond to them with innovation policy solutions;
4. to develop a framework and methods for assessing the expected and realised effects of (challenge-led) innovation policy in overcoming geopolitical and security challenges, and;
5. to develop recommendations, in a co-creative manner, on new innovation and growth policy choices and evaluation tools that consider the changing geopolitical context.

Work packages

Work Package 1 produces contemporary analyses and scenarios of recent geopolitical and security changes. It looks at the changes pertaining to powerful major states – the United States, China and Russia – and how these changes influence the EU and Finland. The WP also examines the increasing resource- and security-oriented interests in the European Arctic.

Work Package 2 creates an analytical framework that serves to understand diverse interrelations between geopolitics, security and challenge-led innovation policy.

Work Package 3 analyses how EU and national innovation policies are taking into account and prepared for geopolitical and security developments. It examines the current Finnish challenge-led innovation and industrial policy mix from the geopolitical/security perspective and compares it to recent developments in the Netherlands where security is part of mission-oriented policy.

Work Package 4 examines, in collaboration with selected Finnish regions, how the changing geopolitical and security context affects challenge-led innovation policies in those regions and potential for innovation and industrial development. In addition, the work package studies how the changed geopolitical situation affects businesses and how regional and national innovation and growth policies can support businesses and competitiveness.

Work Package 5 aims to provide policy solutions on how innovation actors can assess geopolitical and security developments and developing challenge-led innovation policies that also advance societal resilience in Finland and regions in the face of geopolitical uncertainty. The work is based on previous work packages and co-creative workshops with national and regional innovation actors.