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It is argued that innovation policy based on notions of market failure or system failure is too limited in the context of current societal challenges. I propose a third, complexity-theoretic approach. This approach starts from the observation that most innovations are related to existing activities, and that policy's additionality is highest for unrelated diversification. To trigger unrelated diversification into activities that contribute to solving societal challenges, government's main task is to organize the process of demand articulation. This process leads to clear and manageable societal objectives that effectively guide a temporary collation of actors to develop solutions bottom-up. The combination of a broad coalition, a clear objective and tentative governance are the means to cope with the inherent complexity of modern-day innovation.

The sudden rise of the sharing economy has sparked an intense public debate about its definition, its effects and its future regulation. Here, I attempt to provide analytical guidance by defining the sharing economy as the practice that consumers grant each other temporary access to their under-utilized physical assets. Using this definition, the rise of the sharing economy can be understood as occurring at the intersection of three salient economic trends: peer-to-peer exchange, access over ownership and circular business models. I shortly discuss some of the environmental impacts of online sharing platforms and then articulate three possible futures of the sharing economy: a capitalist future cumulating in monopolistic super-platforms allowing for seamless services, a state-led future that shifts taxation from labour to capital and redistributes the gains of sharing from winners to losers, and a citizen-led future based on cooperatively owned platforms under democratic control. The nature and size of the social and environmental impacts are expected to differ greatly in each of the three scenarios.This article is part of the themed issue 'Material demand reduction'.

It is argued that innovation policy based on notions of market failure or system failure is too limited in the context of current societal challenges. I propose a third, complexity-theoretic approach. This approach starts from the observation that most innovations are related to existing activities, and that policy's additionality is highest for unrelated diversification. To trigger unrelated diversification into activities that contribute to solving societal challenges, government's main task is to organize the process of demand articulation. This process leads to clear and manageable societal objectives that effectively guide a temporary collation of actors to develop solutions bottom-up. The combination of a broad coalition, a clear objective and tentative governance are the means to cope with the inherent complexity of modern-day innovation.

Abstract:Economic historians tend to explain the rise of the cooperative form in agriculture from the advantage of cooperative over private factories in reducing transaction costs with suppliers. This study provides a first test of this thesis using data on 1,130 dairy factories in The Netherlands. Indeed, we find that cooperative factories performed significantly better than private factories. The persistence of private factories in certain regions can be explained by first-mover advantages.

Economic development has become understood as being crucially dependent on knowledge production and innovation. Two important features of knowledge production concern its spatial concentration and its embeddedness in collaborative networks. The understanding of economic and scientific development thus requires indicators that capture the spatial and networked nature of knowledge production. This paper aims to contribute by developing and applying an integration measure that indicates the extent to which an organisation is integrated within a network. This measure, being based on the entropy of frequency distributions of collaborative projects, can be applied at any level of aggregation (cf. Frenken 2000). In this study, the focus of analysis is on European integration at the level of cities, countries and the European Union as a whole. The integration measure indicates the degree in which the observed distribution of collaborations differs from the distribution that would have resulted when partner selection would have been random (maximum entropy) indicating perfect integration. Using data taken from the Science Citation Index on inter-institutional collaborations in scientific output of EU countries in the period 1993-2000, European, national and regional patterns in scientific collaboration are analysed. The analysis in divided in three parts. The first part deals with the analysis of national and European collaboration. Results obtained so far (Frenken 2000) show that the European Union has indeed become more integrated, i.e. that the distribution of collaborations has become more random over time. Decomposition of the results shows that the higher level of integration has resulted solely from a more evenly distributed pattern of country-country collaborations, while the bias in national collaborations has not decreased. From a policy perspective, one could argue that European funding, for what concerns European collaborations, has indeed resulted in decreasing biases among countries, but has not resulted in removing the strong propensity of institutions to engage in national collaborative projects. In the second part, I examine the geographical nature of differences in the propensity to collaborate. The results obtained so far show that larger countries are typically better integrated than smaller countries. This can be understood from the assumption that scientific research in the larger countries is most diversified rendering its scientific institutes on average more attractive to collaborative with. This result, however, is not taken to mean that the propensity to collaborate internationally is solely affected by the national level per se. In so far as diversification is related to spatial concentration of scientific research, the same effect should be visible at the city level. This hypothesis is addressed by disaggregation of the data at the level of cities. The analysis will show to what extent collaboration is biased in cities and whether the scale of cities is indeed affecting the propensity to collaborate. Finally, in the third part, the pattern of clustering among cities can indicate the emergence of national and trans-European clusters of cities. The latter type of clusters allows border cities that are peripheral with regard to the national distribution to increase their science base by means of local yet European collaboration. To the extent that this is true, European science policy should take into account the regional embeddedness of European collaborative projects. Furthermore it would imply that localities that are peripheral both in the national and the European sense face serious problems as their propensity to collaborate is expected to remain low. References Frenken, K. (2000) 'A complexity approach to innovation networks', Research Policy 29, 257-72. Frenken, K. (2001) 'Measuring European integration in scientific research', Paper presented at the ECIS Conference 'The Future of Innovation Studies', Eindhoven, The Netherlands, September

Rather than viewing online platforms as digital marketplaces, we analyze platforms as corporations and platform participants as a workforce. Online platforms perform very similar functions as any other corporation, but in different ways (applying terms and conditions as a legal framework and data, reviews, and algorithms for decentralized control) and mostly in different contexts (informal labor markets, sharing communities, social media) than traditional corporations did hitherto. The corporation perspective helps us to understand the transformative power of platforms, while at the same time shedding light on the historical continuation of the corporation as a basic institution in society. We argue that platforms' transformative capacity lies in their continuous development of new institutions that they impose on their workforce and their clientele, codified in terms and conditions. It is the re-coding capacity that provides platforms the ability to continuously adapt the course of institutionalization in largely autonomous manners.

While national governments are the main actors in innovation policy, we witness a proliferation of challenge-oriented innovation policies both at the subnational and the supranational level. This begs the question about subsidiarity: what innovation policies for societal challenges should be organized at subnational, national and supranational levels? We provide arguments that innovation policies aimed to solve societal challenges, such as climate change or aging, are best pursued at subnational levels given the contested nature of problem identification and the contextual nature of problem-solving. Regional innovation policy, then, should formulate concrete societal goals tailored to the local context, while the transnational context promotes inter-regional learning and provides the complementary policies in the realms of basic research, regulation and taxation. In addition, the supranational level can set overall goals that are made more concrete and operational at the subnational level.

Open access (OA) publishing has created new academic and economic niches in contemporary science. OA journals offer numerous publication outlets with varying editorial philosophies and business models. This article analyzes the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) (n = 12,127) to identify characteristics of OA academic journals related to the adoption of article processing charge (APC)-based business models, as well as the price points of journals that charge APCs. Journal impact factor (JIF), language, publisher mission, DOAJ Seal, economic and geographic regions of publishers, peer review duration, and journal discipline are all significantly related to the adoption and pricing of journal APCs. Even after accounting for other journal characteristics (prestige, discipline, publisher country), journals published by for-profit publishers charge the highest APCs. Journals with status endowments (JIF, DOAJ Seal) and articles written in English, published in wealthier regions, and in medical or science-based disciplines are also relatively costlier. The OA publishing market reveals insights into forces that create economic and academic value in contemporary science. Political and institutional inequalities manifest in the varying niches occupied by different OA journals and publishers.