How to Make an Entrepreneurial State: Why Innovation Needs Bureaucracy

Today’s expectations on modern industrial and innovation policies to tackle complex societal challenges, including digital and green transformations, require from modern governments extremely good policy and implementation capacities, which are very hard to create and sustain.

This lecture will introduce the key insights of a recent book - Kattel, Rainer, Wolfgang Drechsler, and Erkki Karo, How to Make an Entrepreneurial State: Why Innovation Needs Bureaucracy, Yale University Press, 2022 – on how some of the more successful countries, including South Korea, have managed to create and sustain such capacities. One of the main arguments of the book is that modern governments need to have capacities for both stability and agility and this requires rethinking much of the conventional wisdom on how public innovation policies should be designed and implemented. In August 2023, the book received the Academy of Management’s George R. Terry book award granted annually to the book judged to have made the most outstanding contribution to the global advancement of management knowledge during the last two years. 

Speaker: Erkki Karo is a Professor of Science and Technology Policy at the Ragnar Nurkse Department of Innovation and Governance of Tallinn University of Technology (Estonia). His academic work focuses on governance of science, technology and innovation policies tackling complex societal challenges. His visit to Seoul National University takes place as part of the Horizon 2020 project CatChain – Catching-up along the Global Value Chains (GA No. 778398).