Evaluating transitions and missions: it's all about the theory

Innovation policies worldwide are shifting from promoting growth towards tackling transitions to make the economy and society more sustainable in the medium to long term. This means that policymakers need a change in mind-set, relying less on theories of innovation that focus on science-push to trigger individual innovations and more on theories of systems innovation that focus more on making entire sociotechnical systems sustainable. While there is a huge research literature on sociotechnical transitions, little of it helps policymakers to design effective policies to achieve them. Policymakers and evaluators alike depend on inventing new kinds of theories of change: the policymakers because they need theories of change to explain how they think their interventions will increase sustainability; evaluators because they use theories of change to test the implementation and effectiveness of the same policies, providing feedback and learning about policy development. In this sense, theories turn out to be very practical. This chapter discusses how theories of change adapt to the new innovation policy objectives, and how evaluation is adapting to the changed theoretical context. It briefly discusses three examples where policymakers and evaluators are evolving new approaches, and explains some of the implications for future policy design and evaluation.