مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

There is widespread agreement that science, technology and innovation (STI) have a role in helping countries tackle social challenges such as climate change, pollution and public health. Providing comprehensive solutions for these global and interconnected problems, however, exceeds the capacity of single states or market forces alone. By definition, Grand Challenges involve “a need to cooperate worldwide to create public goods (mitigation of climate change, health), or protect the global commons (the environment, fisheries)” (OECD, 2010, p.165), calling for action that goes beyond the conventional role played by governments. For policy-makers,thus,the task is also about how to develop and align new policies and practices to address shared societal problems and enhance the impact of solutions.

The term Grand Challenges was added to the EU policy terminology in the late 2000 s (EU, 2008)1, fuelling scholarly interest in the role of STI in strategic responses to collective problems. Part of this work aimed at defining and understanding their characteristics, with one aspect regarded as particularly important: Grand Challenges are qualitatively differentfrom traditional STI concerns, often considered under the logic of national systems of innovation geared towards economic growth (Gassler et al., 2008; Kallerud et al., 2013). Developing technical solutions to achieve relatively uncontested goals is a far cry from the much messier business of mobilising and integrating different actors and perspectives across policy issues and geographical lines to set priorities and agree on solutions in which STI plays a role.

In other words, tackling Grand Challenges requires a broader perspective and calls for system transformation (Mowery et al., 2010), an exercise that involves not only “innovation as traditionally studied and stimulated, but also novel ways of assembling and re-assembling heterogeneous bits of work (including tradi- tional innovation)into evolving constellations that address a Grand Challenge” (Kuhlmann and Rip, 2014, p.4). When policy-making aims solely at technology-specific change, the connections with policy arenas hosting “other types of policies, actors and discursive spheres” are missed (Weber and Rohracher, 2012). In the same way, when scholarly attention is placed mainly on the role of governments as providers of R&D and funding, complementary actors and initiatives remain under the radar.