This paper analyses the development of Eastern European innovation systems since the 1990s by looking together at the theoretical and empirical accounts of two discourses that have had a siginificant impact on the development of innovation systems: innova-tion policy and public administration and management. We propose a framework for analysing the development of innovation policies distinguishing between two concepts- policy and administrative capacity – that are necessary for innovation policy making and implementation. Using the framework we show how the Eastern European innova-tion systems have, because of past legacies and international policy transfer, developed a highly specific understanding of innovation policy based on the initial impact of the Washington Consensus policies and later the European Union. We argue that because of the interplay between the principles and policy reccomendations of the two interna-tional discourses we can see the emergence of a ‘copying paradox ’ in Eastern European innovation systems: that is, despite the perception of policy convergence, we can wit-ness a divergence in the policy from the intended results, and as a result can talk about limited and de-contextualised policy-making capacities.

Abstract. This paper discusses the current state of the ‘open innovation’ thinking in the context of core economic challenges faced by catching-up and developing countries. The main argument of the paper is that due to the paradoxes and contradictions between the ‘mainstream ’ innovation dis-course and practice and the peculiar challenges of the catching-up coun-tries, applying the concept of ‘open innovation ’ may have unintended or reverse effects on catching-up development. This problem can be remedied by more conscious attention to the basic contradictions and paradoxes that requires a more comprehensive analytical focus on innovation and techno-logical development at the levels of firm, industry and policy.

public management, policy capacity, innovation and development erkki karO rainer katteL* In this paper we discuss the question of what factors in development policy create specific forms of policy capacity and under what circumstances development-oriented complementarities or mismatches between the public and private sectors emerge. We argue that specific forms of policy capacity emerge from three inter-linked policy choices, each fundamentally evolutionary in nature: policy choices on understanding the nature and sources of technical change and innovation; on the ways of financing economic growth, in particular technical change; and on the na-ture of public management to deliver and implement both previous sets of policy choices. Thus, policy capacity is not so much a continuum of abilities (from less to more), but rather a variety of modes of making policy that originate from co-evo-lutionary processes in capitalist development. To illustrate, we briefly reflect upon how the East Asian developmental states of the 1960s-1980s and Eastern European transition policies since the 1990s led to almost opposite institutional systems for fi-nancing, designing and managing development strategies, and how this led, through co-evolutionary processes, to different forms of policy capacity.