During the last two decades, innovation has increasingly become a central focus for policy makers. The reason for this is the central role innovation is assumed to play for income and employment growth (and quality of life more generally). However, in spite of this, innovation has not always received the scholarly attention it arguably deserves. For instance, students examining the causes of long-run economic change used to focus on other factors, such as capital accumulation or the working of markets, rather than innovation.

This is now changing. Research on the role of innovation for economic and social change has proliferated in recent years, particularly within the social sciences, and with a bent towards cross-disciplinarity.

The cross- and/or multi-disciplinarity that characterize much scholarly work in this area reflect the fact that no single discipline deals with all aspects of innovation. Arguably, developing a comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon requires a combination of insights from several disciplines. However, this diversity in backgrounds and orientations may also create problems. For example, different parts of the research community use the same concept (such as “innovation”) in different senses, and, similarly, different concepts are used to explain the same phenomenon. Such “conceptual fuzziness” may be an important obstacle for meaningful interaction between researchers in the field.

This does not mean that attempts to have constructive interaction between scholars with different backgrounds in this field are doomed to failure. Instead, it suggests that effort and leadership are needed to create and support such interaction. One such attempt in which several of the potential participants in this project were involved, was the TEARI project (2002-2004) which led to publication of the Oxford Handbook of Innovation (Oxford University Press, October 2004), edited by Jan Fagerberg, David Mowery and Richard Nelson. The current project builds on the results obtained there. However, while the TEARI project attempted to create a broad overview of our current knowledge on the subject, the current project aimed at exploring a small set of strongly interrelated issues in greater depth.

The project has functioned on several levels. A central activity was the workshops, which generally must be considered as very successful, at least based on the outputs and reactions from the participants. Results from the two first workshops are at the time of writing in the process of being assessed for publication in the two most central journals in this area. The effect of the third workshop, more explorative in character, is more difficult to assess, but participants found this workshop particularly helpful. For instance, a very senior participant expressed the view that this workshop was likely to have a lasting influence on the research agenda in this area.

In addition to this, participants have worked individually and in smaller groups on selected themes, and very important progress has been made. For example, a number of participants have worked on the history of innovation studies, its cross-disciplinary nature and conceptual issues, work that eventually will find its way to journals in this area. Another important output, started earlier, but finalized during the stay at CAS, is the book edited by Fagerberg, Mowery and Verspagen on the working of the Norwegian innovation system (“Innovation, Path-Dependency and Policy”, Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

The stay has also led to several important contributions of the role of innovation in the global economy and initiated much needed new work on the subject involving scholars from different continents.