Knowledge economy in Lithuania - the missing ingredients (2): Innovative innovation policies

Over the last few years the Lithuanian government and legislators adopted two dozens (22 to be precise) „strategic documents“, which all envisage the innovative knowledge economy for Lithuania. To name the few:

• Long-term Development Strategy of the State (12 November 2002);
• Long-term Economy Development Strategy Until 2015 (12 June 2002);
• Science and Technology Parks Development Concept (18 July 2003);
• Long-term Scientific Research and Experimental Activities Development Strategy (22 December 2003)
• High Technology Development Program (22 December 2003)
• Information Society Development Strategy in Lithuania (8 June 2005);
• and the most recent the 21 March 2007 Concept for Establishment and Development of Integrated Science, Studies and Business Centres (Valleys).

The problem with all these documents is that they completely fail to inspire. In other words – they suggest bureaucracy instead of innovation, they provide process instead of particular action, and they imply lack of responsibility instead of responsible actors and particular funding. They offer just politically correct summary of the foreign material, which are ticking the „right“ boxes in Brussels, but not among the people and businesses.

To be more specific:

• All said strategies are essentially a "follow the success of the Scandinavian countries or Ireland" approach, which, although useful for the studies of the history of innovation friendly environments, is completely irrelevant for the modern day Lithuania; those who have closely studied the post-WWII economic success stories would mostly agree that trying to repeat these scenarios is akin to shooting blanks, since:

• there are at least couple dozen countries in the world who are trying to do the same;
• all country success stories have very specific time and place characteristics, or inherent advantages, which are not repeatable (e.g. huge culturally uniform market).

• The strategies fail to be innovative themselves; the authors/actors of the strategy hardly believe the strategy themselves, and why should they? It is just so much easier and more convenient to absorb the interim benefits awarded for the authors/actors, rather than to innovate.

Innovation is always a gamble. Innovative economy is a gamble in third degree. There is no universal recipe for guaranteed innovation. What Lithuania needs is the courage to fail, instead of the „guaranteed innovation“ (read – slow growth or stagnation) strategies. The real challenge is to experiment with several different and novel innovative innovation environments, rather than trying to imitate the success of the others, and allow the free global market to select what it likes, ruthlessly killing all the struggling initiatives of today.