Finland’s Strategic Centres for Science, Technology and Innovation: New Pathways of Epistemic Governance

• In Event: 540 - Section on Science, Knowledge, and Technology Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 05. Technology/Innovation

Abstract

Six Strategic Centres for Science, Technology and Innovation (SCSTIs) were launched in Finland in the years 2007 – 2009. SHOKs are instruments of Finnish innovation policy, bringing industrial and academic partners into open limited companies with the shared purpose of accelerating innovation processes and renewing Finland’s industrial clusters. Funding for SHOKs comes from both public sources and participating companies. Ministry of Empolyment and the Economy, the governmental steering body of SCSTIs, published an external evaluation report on SCSTIs in February 2013. The report is highly critical of functionality of these policy instruments so far, indicating problems in goal setting, cooperation of partners, quality of related scientific research and added economic value, for example.
From sociological viewpoint, the trajectory of SCSTIs injects some realism into well-known models of new knowledge production such as ’post-academic science’, ’mode 2 knowledge’ and ’triple-helix’, which tend to get the air of smooth necessity or unproblematic ideal in research literature. Furthermore, the detailed conflicts and failures in SCs present empirical problems of interpretation to such frameworks which put the development of knowledge production into a rather monolithic picture (e.g. ’academic capitalism’, ’neo-liberalism’).
This paper stems from post-Foucauldian studies of governmentality and specifically applies the concept of ’epistemic governance’. Epistemic governance encompasses the ways by which actors work on other actors’ conceptions of realities.

Author

• Seppo Poutanen, University of Turku