Austria's 20-year building program reveals how to sustain long-term innovation policy
A new analysis of Austria's Building of Tomorrow initiative shows that successful mission-oriented programs need flexibility and regular reinvention—not just rigid planning. The findings offer a roadmap for governments designing industrial transition policies in construction, energy, and other sectors facing structural change.
Originaltitel: Navigating missions: experiences from a long-term R&I programme to transform the building sector in Austria
<p>Mission-oriented innovation policies are increasingly recognized as an effective strategy for initiating and guiding far-reaching transition processes towards sustainability. In this article, we examine a successful early example of a national mission-oriented research and innovation (R&I) programme (Building of Tomorrow) that has had a significant impact on the building sector in Austria. The objective is to identify the factors and dynamics that contributed to the programmes success and helped maintain its momentum over a period of more than 20 years. By successively integrating different groups of researchers and practitioners, organizing programme development as an adaptive process of co-production, and regularly reinventing itself by shifting focus and guiding ideas, the programme sustained its mission momentum. Several insights from this case study can provide valuable guidance for organizing mission-oriented programmes, particularly by avoiding an exclusive emphasis on mission orientation by design at the expense of processes of sense-making, emergence, and reinvention.</p>