Innovation as politics: The rise and reshaping of innovation in UK parliamentary discourse 1960–2005

Research Policy 42 (2013) 1815–1828

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Innovation as politics: The rise and reshaping of innovation in UK parliamentary discourse 1960–2005 Lew Perren 1 , Jonathan Sapsed ∗ University of Brighton, UK

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Article history: Received 20 August 2011 Accepted 20 July 2013 Available online 18 October 2013 Keywords: History of innovation Innovation policy Innovation and politics National systems of innovation

a b s t r a c t This paper offers a systematic analysis of the use of the term ‘innovation’ in policy discourse over a fortyfive year period. Innovation has increased in usage in the academic and policy analyst communities, but we know little of politicians’ use of the word and its changing meanings. The paper argues that language is important in diffusing ideas and embedding ideologies. By analysing words co-located with innovation in Hansard, the UK’s parliamentary record, both the stable and the changing uses of the word over the decades are examined. Considering the results in the light of ‘stylised facts’ in innovation policy studies reveals that use of the term innovation has increased over the period studied. It has entered a wide variety of policy domains and it has been used in an increasingly positive tone. It has been associated with both drivers and barriers to innovation, with greater emphasis on government as the driver of innovation, despite oscillations between the public and private sectors over the period. The implications of a broadening of the meaning of innovation are discussed, and the paper considers whether increasing usage of the term reflects growing familiarity with the ‘Systems of Innovation’ approach among policy makers. © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction As Nick von Tunzelmann has argued, a major, sometimes the major, influence on industrial progress has been governmental institutions and ideologies, which shape the general climate of business opinion (von Tunzelmann, 1995, pp. 21–22). Adherence to the political ideologies on innovation in government policy has been particularly keenly pursued in the UK at various times over the past four decades (von Tunzelmann, 2004, p. 331). A primary means for disseminating these ideologies is language. This paper offers systematic evidence on the parliamentary discourse on innovation over a forty-five year period by analysing both its stable and changing meanings. The analysis of a unique historical dataset provides a basis for examining these meanings and for an interpretation in the light of certain ‘stylised facts’ about innovation drawn from the innovation studies literature. This suggests the increasing importance of innovation and its expansion across policy fields, its increasingly positive image, and the growing, albeit not dominant use of ‘systems of innovation’ rationales for government intervention (see Fig. 1).

∗ Corresponding author at: University of Brighton, CENTRIM, 154-155 Edward Street, Brighton BN2 0JG, UK. Tel.: +44 01273 680781. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (L. Perren), [email protected] (J. Sapsed). 1 University of Brighton, Mithras House, Lewes Road, Brighton BN2 4AT, UK. 0048-7333/$ – see front matter © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2013.08.012

The word innovation has become central in academic, political and practitioner discussion of the economy and the future of business (Barber and White, 1987; Fagerberg and Verspagen, 2009; Martin, 2012). In the UK, by 2010 innovation had become a central theme in both Government policies2 and those of the official opposition.3 Indeed, Fig. 2 shows4 that there has been a tenfold increase in the use of the term in parliamentary debates from the 1960s to the 2000s. Although innovation appeared for many decades before this, its dramatic rise in usage began at this time. Researchers have used a discourse methodology to explore various aspects of innovation. Linton (2009), for example, has examined the discourse of innovation within the academic literature, confirming that interpretations of the meanings of the term are influenced by one’s perspective (see also e.g. Lovell, 2008; Salaman and Storey, 2002; Suchman and Bishop, 2000).

2 See page on the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills’ website: http:// (now archived at http:// www.bis.gov.uk/policies/by/themes/innovation webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ + http://www.bis.gov.uk/policies/by/themes/ innovation). 3 See for example: The Labour Manifesto 2010: A Fair Future for All, Labour Party, page 6. 4 Millbank systems electronic version of Hansard containing parliamentary debates is only available up to 2005. The frequency for the 2000–2010 bar of the chart has been extrapolated for the ten year period from the five year 2000–2005 value.

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for evidence in response to research questions derived from the innovation studies literature. The paper has the following structure. We first discuss why it is helpful to examine the usage of the word innovation through the lens of theories of politically charged meaning and discursive action in relation to policy making. The next section explains the methodology. This is followed by an overview of the main features of the dataset of innovation discourse provided through an analysis framework. Following this we explore the innovation literature and suggest research questions that can be applied to the dataset. Results and then discussion follow and we end with some conclusions. 2. Politically charged meaning and discursive action Fig. 1. UK Prime Minister David Cameron speaks for the ‘Innovation is Great (Britain)’ campaign of the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills in 2012. Photograph: PA.

The linguistic meaning of the word innovation is also important in the field of politics. In this paper, the use of the term innovation is traced in order to understand its changing meanings over forty-five-years of political debate in the UK Parliament, a period spanning Wilson’s ‘white heat of technology’, Thatcherism and Blair’s New Labour government (e.g. Meredith, 2003). In this paper, we approach the history of innovation through the analysis of linguistic data. This is a means of examining stylised facts about innovation that we extract from the academic literature. In most studies of innovation, the examination of such propositions rests on testing and verification of quantitative empirical data such as patenting, output, R&D expenditure and productivity. While there are important historical narratives that have been central to our understanding of innovation based on case studies and ethnographies, there have been few qualitative studies of archival materials, such as parliamentary records, to examine the empirical evidence on received views of innovation drawn from the scholarly literature. We proceed in the way that historians (and some evolutionary scientists) typically approach the problem of explaining how a present condition came to be: through both deductive and inductive techniques (Gaddis, 2002). We construct a dataset by extracting words from the UK parliamentary record using linguistic principles; we next code the data and build categories and themes inductively, showing the core uses of the term innovation by politicians over a 45-year period. We then interrogate the thematic dataset

Fig. 2. Number of times the word ‘innovation’ was used in parliamentary discourse. Source: Hansard and Millbank Systems.3

Certain terms become politically charged and their construction becomes emblematic of the beliefs and concerns in society (Fairclough, 2006; Hall, 1996; Stubbs, 1996). Raymond Williams (1983) called these ‘keywords’ that epitomise the cultural zeitgeist, referring, for example, to words such as capitalism, ecology, hegemony, intellectual, nationalist, progressive, subjective, technology and wealth. Hall (1996) identified Race as a politically charged word, suggesting that Race is a ‘floating signifier’,5 that is, a construction with meaning that shifts according to political expediency. He showed that the meaning of Race varies depending on purpose such that the construction of meaning often draws upon the ideology of science and is represented as a fact when it is actually a social construction (Hall, 1996). Globalisation similarly has been identified as a politically charged word. For instance, for Fairclough (2006) it is a vessel for “the precepts and prescriptions of economic neo-liberalism”. Perren and Dannreuther (2012) have shown that certain words and phrases such as ‘entrepreneur’ or ‘small firm’ which are shared within the management lexicon serve as politically charged ‘floating signifiers’ that reflect ideological nuances deeply ingrained in societal beliefs (see also Dannreuther and Perren, 2013). This approach enables a subtler understanding of the ideological nuances of word usage than does Gramsci’s (1971) notion of hegemony. ‘Floating signifiers’ are called upon and used as rhetorical gambits depending upon the circumstances in which they are used. We adopt a similar perspective to previous work (Perren and Dannreuther, 2012; Dannreuther and Perren, 2013), which follows Barley and Tolbert (1997) to combine insights from ‘structuration theory’ (Giddens, 1986), new institution theory (e.g. DiMaggio and Powell, 1983) and social constructionist approaches (Berger and Luckmann, 1967; Gergen, 1994). Our approach is in line with what Schmidt and Radaelli (2004, p. 197) calls ‘discursive institutionalism’ in political science, such that: “discourse should be considered not only in terms of the other mediating factors that affect policy change, but also in terms of the rules that frame ideas and discourse in different political-institutional settings”. From this perspective, individual agents can use established institutional meanings and rules linked with the word innovation to justify their actions and support their plans (Giddens, 1986). Through such usage keywords become wrapped in symbolic word-associations that draw upon an interconnected system of wider meanings, symbols and beliefs, and which come to be ‘taken for granted’ at all levels of institutions and by social actors (Berger and Luckmann, 1967; Callon et al., 1983; Kristeva, 1980). Discursive engagements among agents

5 See discussions of floating signification in Derrida (2001), Hall (1996), Levi-Strauss (1987), Laclau (1996) and Norval (2000). Also in relation to entrepreneurship, see Jones and Spicer (2005), Koiranen and Hyrsky (1996), Nicholson and Anderson (2005), Perren and Dannreuther (2012) and Richie (1991, p. 5).

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Fig. 3. Overview of the method.

and institutions can be expected over time to shift the meanings and accepted rules connected with keywords such as innovation as agents adapt to new meanings within a recursive process of meaning construction (Berger and Luckmann, 1967; Gergen, 1994). The constructions of innovation by elite politicians are particularly worthy of study because institutions such as universities, public sector organisations and government policy-makers give access to power (Dannreuther, 2007; March and Olsen, 1984). As the boundary between the public and private sector becomes blurred, private sector organisations may also be influenced by changes in discursive strategies. This may magnify the power of a key word such as innovation and what it signifies in other interconnected institutional settings (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983). The ‘performative’ aspect (Austin, 1975) of utterances of innovation in Parliament may be particularly powerful and result in policy decisions and legislation that have a profound influence on institutions and the lives of people within society. In the UK and the European Union, this ‘performative’ aspect is visible in many instruments and schemes evoking innovation across government and particularly in those associated with the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) and its predecessors as well as in the many innovation initiatives of the European Commission’s Framework Research and Technology Development Programme 7. The ‘performative’ character of innovation is less obvious in intervention areas such as taxation and intra-government initiatives, but we suggest that it is nevertheless likely to be detected based on an analysis of its status as a floating signifier. Following this line of argument, understanding how the meaning of the word innovation has shifted within parliamentary discourse should yield insights into the symbols and rules that politicians have come to associate with it, how these have changed over time, what ‘performative’ actions have been taken in the name of innovation, and how politicians have engaged with the term to legitimise their actions and those of their institutions. Given the interconnections between institutions and agents, an analysis of parliamentary discourse can also be expected to hint at the symbolic meaning of innovation in other institutions such as the political executive, pressure groups, universities and the media (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983).

It is surprising that little empirical research has looked systematically at politicians’ use of the term innovation, given the apparent political importance of innovation. Where innovation policy research has taken a discursive approach, the focus has been on stakeholders other than politicians, for example, there are studies of academic engagement with the word innovation (Fagerberg and Verspagen, 2009; Linton, 2009) and management’s discourse on innovation (e.g. Salaman and Storey, 2002; Suchman and Bishop, 2000). Within innovation studies, where systematic language analysis techniques have been employed (e.g. Callon et al., 1983, 1991), the purpose has not been specifically to investigate the use of the term. Similarly, Lovell’s (2008) discourse analysis of language associated with innovation journeys in low-energy housing included national government in the analysis, but did not examine political usage of the word innovation. This paper begins to fill this gap in knowledge about the political use of the word innovation by systematically analysing parliamentary debates. Following Saussure (1966), the word ‘innovation’ is understood as a sign (an utterance or word on a page) that derives its signification or meaning from linkages with co-located words. As Firth (1957, p. 11) puts it, “you shall know a word by the company it keeps”. Transformations in symbolic word-associations or the colocated words (Stubbs, 1996) around innovation are understood as providing an indelible temporal trace of meaning. The next section explains the methodology employed to reveal the meaning of innovation within parliamentary debate over the past several decades in the UK. 3. Methodology The methodology employed in this paper builds upon Perren and Dannreuther (2012)6 , modified as indicated in this section. The empirical procedure is outlined in Fig. 3 and explained in more detail below. This phase of the research was largely inductive, using

6 Perren and Dannreuther (2012) drew upon methods from corpus linguistics (Stubbs, 1996; Mason, 2000; Mitkov, 2004; and Baker, 2006) to investigate the use of the term ‘entrepreneur’ in parliamentary discourse.

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Mutual Information (MI), z-score and t-score statistical techniques7 from corpus linguistics to identify words co-located around the keyword innovation, extracting those that are particularly important in conferring meaning. A qualitative analysis of co-located words was conducted subsequently and the resulting codes were grouped into themes. This phase was followed by a deductive analytical phase whereby the data from the first phase were examined in the light of a set of research questions inspired by the innovation studies literature. Fig. 3 gives an overview of the steps in the inductive phase: generating the dataset, performing the co-location analysis and a qualitative analysis of the co-located words. The methods follow corpus analytical techniques discussed by Stubbs (1996) and a number of other authors (Baker, 2006; Mason, 2000; McEnery, 2003; Mitkov, 2004). The corpus approach aligns well with the aim of analysing contextual meaning because it provides a mechanism for exploring a keyword in context, in this case, the word innovation (see Stubbs’, 1996, discussion of Firth). The assumption is that through co-locations (or collocations) meaning is made (e.g. Callon et al., 1983; Firth, 1957; Joseph et al., 2001; Medina, 2005; Stubbs, 1996;). The approach used here resonates epistemologically with Callon et al.’s (1983, 1991) co-word analysis, but is more appropriate for analysis of a single key-term and it has been adapted for computer-based analysis of large datasets (e.g. Mason, 2000). The first stage involved generating a corpus that would give access to political debates, be accessible electronically and be available for a long time frame. Millbank Systems provides a web-based archive of Parliamentary “edited verbatim reports of the proceedings” of the UK House of Commons and House of Lords from 1803 to 2005 (www.publications.parliament. uk/pa/cm200405/cmselect/cmcomm/65/6504.htm). The Millbank System was searched for the word innovation, resulting in 19,185 pages, which were transferred to a database for analysis. The next stage was to analyse the words co-located around the keyword innovation. A bespoke program8 was used to extract co-located words that spanned five words to the left or right of the keyword9 (influenced by Mason, 2000). These extracts are termed Key Word in Context (KWIC) in linguistics, an example being the string “profits are the source of innovation, new development, more employment, more”. This process yielded 13,651 unique candidate co-locates. In this paper, we include data from the 1960s onwards as discussed in the preceding section. Corpus linguistics employs a technique comparing the frequency of co-located words in a sample against the chance of a similar frequency of use in an example of ‘normal’ language (e.g. Stubbs, 1996) as discussed below. This technique

7 The statistical tests and thresholds used are the same as reported by Perren and Dannreuther (2012, p. 9): “the popular Mutual Information (MI), t-score and z-score tests of significance were used with established threshold values: the MI threshold was 1.58, the t-score threshold was 2 and the z-score 3 (Barnbrook, 1996). MI, z-score and t-scores were calculated by the program using the formula from Barnbrook (1996) and Mason (2000): Mutual Information (MI) = Log 2 (Observed/Expected) (see Shannon and Weaver, 1949) z-score = (Observed-Expected)/Standard Deviation of occurrence of word in corpus t-score = (Observed − Expected)/Square Root of Observed”. 8 A bespoke Java programme developed by one of the authors is used in adapted forms in other research – see Perren and Dannreuther (2012) and Dannreuther and Perren (2013): “the bespoke Java modules, developed by one of the authors to undertake the computational aspect of the corpus analysis, drew inspiration from a number of technical sources: ‘scraping’ the web-pages was informed by Blum et al. (1998) and Trottier (2002, chapter eight); ‘stripping’ them of their superfluous html tags was guided by Friedl (2006)” (Perren and Dannreuther, 2012, p. 6), while Mason (2000, chapter seven) was used as a guide to help with breaking down the strings of data into words. 9 Other researchers have shown that words beyond this span rarely provide important additional signification (for example, Phillips, 2003, who cites Clear, 1993).

highlights co-locates that are especially important in bringing signification (additional meaning) to the word innovation. The rate of use of words co-located around the word innovation in the corpus was compared against the chance of a similar level of ‘normal’ use; in this case the BNC (British National Corpus) providing a proxy of ‘normal’ language (see www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk). Changes in magnitude of all the collocates do not provide a helpful proxy for the additional meaning brought to the keyword because so-called functional words like ‘the’, ‘a’ and ‘to’ are not information rich and their ubiquitous use gives little extra meaning. Similarly, other co-locate words may have a high frequency of use, but are frequently used words in ‘normal’ language. Instead of using raw frequencies, corpus analysis gets around this problem by comparing the frequency of a co-locate with the frequency of the same word in a ‘control’ corpus of ‘normal usage’. Tests of significance are used to isolate collocates that occur with an unexpectedly high frequency (Barnbrook, 1996; Mason, 2000), indicating where they exceed pre-established threshold values that they bring meaning outside the range of what would be expected in ‘normal’ use. All co-locates that met the threshold values set for the MI, z-score and t-score statistical tests were included in the analysis.10 The next step was to analyse changes in the patterns of meaning of the keyword by examining changes in co-located words (Ragin, 1987). Only co-located words that occurred in each of the four decades were retained, creating a basis for comparison with colocate words found in every decade (Ragin, 1987). This analysis yielded 209 co-locates occurring only in a single decade, each of which had multiple KWIC associated strings. These were imported into the qualitative data analysis package N-Vivo 8, where they were coded to yield 740 inductive free node and tree node patterns of meaning. The choice of decade intervals for the analysis is consistent with historical analysis seeking to achieve a regular time period for comparison. Lundvall and Borrás (2005), for example, structured their review of innovation policy by decade, observing changes in trends at the beginning of each decade. The open coding procedure, following Miles and Huberman (1994) and Corbin and Strauss (2007), started with inductively derived codes (called free-nodes in N-Vivo) that were closely associated with the contextual meaning that the KWIC conferred on the keyword. The aim was to reveal changes in the meaning of the word innovation through analysis of its context of use. For this reason predetermined codes were not used as an externally derived coding protocol would have imposed external meaning. A content analysis was not employed because the raw frequency of word usage cannot be taken as an indicator of importance, as discussed above. The free-nodes were then grouped into categories to indicate the meaning given to the keyword innovation by the collocated word. These categories were organised further into meta-categories to distil the meaning at a higher level of abstraction. The example, in the case of the KWIC “profits are the {source} of innovation, new development, more employment, more”, ‘source’ is a co-located word that surpassed the statistical test thresholds, indicating it is central to the meaning added to the word innovation. The first freenode code is ‘profit as a source of innovation’. This was assigned to the category ‘profit and reward drivers’ along with other free-node codes that were subsequently assigned to the meta-category ‘processes driving innovation’ and then at the highest level to ‘drivers of innovation’. The N-Vivo software provides a trail from the top level coding hierarchy tree-nodes through to other tree nodes, freenodes and to the source KWICs. Using NVivo’s ‘matrix query’, the data were cross-tabulated by decade to reveal patterns over time.

10

See note 6.

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Fig. 4. Overview of discursive portrayal of the word innovation in the decades of the 1960s to 2000s.

The next section discusses the resulting organisation of the innovation discourse data. 4. Overview of innovation discourse The analysis described above resulted in the coding hierarchy illustrated in Fig. 4, showing the overall discursive portrayal of the word innovation from the 1960s to 2000s at the top level of abstraction using the coding categories to the level just above free-nodes. For example, the category ‘Profit and Reward [drivers]’ can be found at the top left-hand side of the diagram in the meta-category ‘Processes [driving innovation]’, which in turn can be found in the top-level class of ‘Drivers of innovation’. Fig. 4 is not a comprehensive distillation of all the discourse over the period. It brings together contrasting co-locates from across the four decades to aid the analysis in the next sections. In Fig. 4 there are five top-level classes: drivers of innovation, barriers of innovation, positive-inference, negative-inference and domains of innovation. This highlights how the discourse of political actors has portrayed innovation as being at the centre of two competing discourses: a drivers-barriers discourse and a positive-negative discourse. Similar to a Lewinian force-field (Lewin, 1943), the status and signification of the innovation discourse in the context of these rhetorical pressures can be expected to depend on their positioning and strength in any particular period. The drivers-barriers and positive–negative discourses are mirrored at the meta-category level as shown in Fig. 4. The drivers and barriers classes both share the categories attitudes and processes, albeit with different influences on the meaning of innovation. Likewise, the positive-inference and negative-inferences classes share

scale-related categories. Positive scale categories are, for example: ‘extremely successful’, ‘startling’ and ‘global’; negative scale categories are, for example, ‘somewhat undesirable’, ‘extremely dangerous’ and ‘fairly dubious’. While positive and negative categories share some subcategories, the differences in meta-categories are noteworthy. The Drivers class has the meta-category of ‘actors’, with categories such as ‘consumers’, ‘management’, ‘people’ and ‘shop floor’, but no similar category is found in the Barriers class. The positive-inference class has the meta-category of ‘time’ with categories such as ‘long-term’, ‘constant’ and ‘modern’, but no similar category is found in negative-inferences. The ‘domain of innovation’ shows where the discourse on innovation occurs. The contexts of innovation range during the period through public-sector areas such as education, health and the government, through to private sector areas such as accountancy, consultancy and construction. The voluntary sector is shown below the public sector as a separate category. Table 1 provides an overview of the most important co-locate words by decade. This highlights the temporal patterns of changes in usage of the word innovation and its associated meanings. We can observe the tight focus of the early and stable signification of innovation and the loosening of meaning over time to the point where this signification appears to become fragmented in the 2000s. Table 2 provides an overview of stable signification themes. The stable words co-located with innovation over the four decades suggest five themes: innovation as (1) important (‘important’, ‘major’); (2) a positive progressive and instrumental force (‘useful’) located in industry and involving technology and research; (3) as a novelty (‘interesting’, ‘introduced’, ‘new’, ‘recent’); (4) something to be supported over time (‘development’, ‘encourage’); and (5) associated

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Table 1 Overview of innovation important co-locate words by decade. 1960

1970

1980

1990

2000

comparatively* complete* entirely* modern* rate* somewhat* startling* striking* surely* thought*

acceptance* airline* amendment* ballot* fairly* particular* prevent*referendum* source* tax*

adoption*aid*allocated* assisted*attitude*available* aware* concentrated* constructive*curriculum* detailed*deter* disincentive* dissemination* educational* finance* fiscal*helpful* hitherto* housing* imaginative* independent* intellectual* inventiveness* lack*learned* linked* managerial* million* moratorium* package* programme* protection* spirit* stified* stimulation* sustained

access* admirable*advisory*availability* choice* commerce* committe* constant* consultancy* contained* continuous* crucial* culture* damaging* democratic*deregulation* directed * effective*emphasis* extremely*fatigue* flourish*foresight* fundholding*generate* GP*inward*jointly* long-term*managed* novelty*potential* precisely*private* proper*pursuit*recognise* recognised*related* saying*seeking* select*shall* significant*small*spread* success*supported*talking* thinking*times* tradition*training* transfer*warmly* widely*worthwhile

10-year*21st* added*aerospace* agenda*audit* automotive* autonomy*barrier* called*carbon* catalyst*challenge* chancellor*changing* children*collaborative* commissioned*compete* considering*construction* consultation*contracting* contributing*contribution* customer*definition* deliver*demonstrate* derelict*drive*driven* driver*driving*dynamic* dynamism*earned* education*efficient* energy*enhance*essential* facilitate*freight* future*global*identified* impact*included* infrastructure*innovative* intended*keen* knowledge*legislation* lost*lower*ministerial* office*opportunity* originality*particularly* partnership*pilot* policy*procurement* public*publication* raise*raising* recommendation*recommended* regulatory*relevant* report*rightly*risk* risk-taking* role*seeing* setting*strategic* strengthening*supply* targeted*textile* tribute*winning*world-class

with government (‘constitutional’, ‘Government’). These might be considered traditional associations consistent with the assumptions of conventional innovation policy concerned with technology, industry, and R&D, and with a government role in supporting it. These stable meanings are consistent with those in the academic literature. Fagerberg et al. (2012) suggest similar thematic foci based on their analysis of keywords (see Table 5 of their article). The political discourse on innovation appears to have become more inclusive over time, while the opposite is the case in the academic discourse. In the early stages of academic analysis of innovation, pioneers like Schumpeter, Rogers and Freeman differed in their definitions of innovation, but the meaning of the concept appears to have solidified and converged in the 1970s and 1980s (Fagerberg et al., 2012, p. 1143).

Table 2 Stable signification themes. Signification themes

Important co-locates

Important Involving technology Novel Support Involving government

important * major * useful * industry * technical * technological* research * interesting * introduced * new * recent development * encourage constitutional * Government *

5. Research questions The historical overview reveals unstable, decade-specific meanings which highlight the changes, additions and fashions of word usage reflecting the character of these periodic moments. These characteristics come to light when we move to the second phase of the analysis, where we interrogate the historical database in the light of ‘stylised facts’ drawn from the innovation studies literature. We proceed by discussing some of the claims and debates in the literature, from which we distil certain questions, which are then considered in the light of our empirical evidence of changes in the innovation discourse over the period. We know that the term innovation has increased in usage as a signifier in the growing corpus of academic literature (Fagerberg and Verspagen, 2009). It has come to serve as an ‘umbrella’ term incorporating science and technology policy, the economics of innovation and technical change, and innovation management (Martin, 2012). It has been argued that the concept of innovation became more broadly used as the economic crises of the 1970s came to be understood as being rooted in an inability to exploit new technologies (Freeman et al., 1982; Rothwell, 1982; Lundvall and Borrás, 2005, p. 612).The shift to innovation policy was characterised by Rothwell (1982) as a ‘fusion’ of science and technology policy – concerned with research budget allocation, infrastructure, technical education, and intellectual property – with industrial

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policy, concerned with investment grants, tariffs and trade, tax, and managing industrial restructuring. This view was an early recognition of the mutual interest in innovation policy and the wider economy. Nauwelaers and Wintjes, (2008, p. 286) see innovation as ‘invading’ other domains of public policy. Innovation policy does not act alone, but often in concert with other areas of government, giving rise to the idea of a ‘policy mix’. Objectives other than innovation become co-opted into the goals of innovation, which have become dispersed (Flanagan et al., 2011) or ‘widened’ to incorporate a greater number of policy instruments and ‘deepened’ in terms of the sophistication of the execution and evaluation of policy (Borrás, 2009). As to the changing views of innovation on the part of politicians, the innovation studies literature is silent with only a few exceptions. Fagerberg and Verspagen (2009, p. 218) acknowledge that “Politicians care about innovation too. . .” but move swiftly on to discuss the academic perspective on innovation. Innovation policy studies has been accused of being overly technocratic and of missing the ‘politics’ of policymaking (Flanagan et al., 2011, p. 4). As Morlacchi and Martin (2009) point out, science, technology and innovation policy research is often depoliticised, treating the policy process essentially as a technical planning exercise. Why this omission? It is sometimes argued that parliament has become less powerful than the executive function of government and this may account for the lack of research in this area. However, legislatures are where new acts are debated and passed, where issues are raised, later to be taken up by the media, and where elected representatives reflect the concerns of political parties and their constituents. The discourses employed in legislatures, in this case parliamentary debates, therefore represent a credible forum for the analysis of the changing political zeitgeist and the prevailing debates. Even if parliament has declined in power, it is nevertheless close to the power of the executive and, to a considerable degree, holds it to account. If there is evidence of politicians increasingly using innovation in their discourse, this can be taken as an alignment of academic analysts and policy makers in highlighting its importance for the economy. Conversely, if politicians are not found to be using the term, this can be taken as evidence of a disconnection between academic and political discourse, suggesting that innovation was not a widespread concern for policy makers over the period analysed here. Research Question 1: Has the term innovation increased in usage among UK politicians? In line with debates in the academic literature regarding policy mixes and the ‘invasion’ of innovation into other areas of policy, we can examine whether the word innovation has been contained in a silo of government policy or whether there is evidence of its incursion into other policy areas. Research Question 2: Has usage of the term innovation extended to policy domains other than science, technology and innovation? The positive or negative connotations associated with the word innovation may be indicators of its ascendance or descent in the political sphere. Increasing usage of the word may be indicative of politicians seeking to regulate and limit innovation policy rather than to promote it. Based on studies in the academic literature and comments by politicians, technological innovation was perceived as a largely positive force in the post-war period up to the 1960s. In the UK, the Ministry for Technology was established in the 1960s “. . .to use technology to overcome our economic problems and allow us the surplus and leisure which is necessary for the enrichment of human life” (Benn, 1967, p. 15). In the 1970s, however, dissatisfaction grew and, as Lundvall and Borrás (2005) point out,

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there was an end to uncritical optimism. This was attributable partly to social and environmental concerns and questions about the sustainability of economic growth. Subsequently, the use of the word innovation in academic and policy discourse became uncritically positive once again. Witt (2003), as cited in Flanagan et al., 2011, p. 704) says: “. . .an implicit presumption in evolutionary economics and its policy making applications is that innovativeness [. . .] is, by and large, beneficial and therefore ought to be encouraged”. Flanagan et al. argue that this underlies a subtle shift in the status of innovation from a means of achieving other economic objectives to becoming a policy goal itself, with the implication that it is unambiguously desirable. Research Question 3: Is innovation discourse predominantly a positive discourse? In this process, the word innovation becomes a floating signifier, that is, a word that acquires a warm glow by association with other words with which it is used. Research Question 4: Is the word innovation a floating signifier? The academic literature also suggests that the role of government may be associated with drivers and barriers to innovation. Lundvall and Borrás (2005) argue, for instance, that there are broadly two versions of innovation policy and that these mirror policy generally. The first is a laissez faire model, in which the role of government is to provide the conditions for innovation to flourish and to correct for occasional market failures such as in the case of basic research and education, whereas subsidising firms or technologies is thought to interfere with market efficiency. Language is important here, as Lundvall and Borrás indicate: “This often goes with a vocabulary where any kind of specific measure gets grouped under the negative heading “picking the winners” (2005, p. 611). Although the laissez faire model does not preclude policy initiatives and services to support innovation and business, which may include direct subsidies and grants to small firms and entrepreneurs, the emphasis is on removing barriers to innovation. The second model of innovation policy is characterised as the ‘systemic’ version (Lundvall and Borrás, 2005) and is associated with ‘Systems of Innovation’ thinking. Here, the role of government is to boost innovation by ensuring that core policy areas contribute and that institutions are linked to co-ordinate flows of resources. Systemic policies are expected to differ across countries and over time. In both of these models, innovation is seen as energising and driving economic change and wealth creation. The laissez faire model assumes that this will occur largely automatically if government removes barriers, while the systemic model assumes that innovation depends on institutions interlinking and functioning as a co-ordinated system and that the government has an appreciably greater role in driving innovation. This suggests that the discourse of policy makers may reflect the subtle nuances of these models and that we might expect a shift towards the systemic model, which became more predominant in the academic literature in the period studied here. Politicians may have come to accept the ‘systems of innovation’ model, and that this may be reflected in changes in the discourse about innovation barriers or drivers. Research Question 5: Has the discourse on drivers increased relative to that on barriers? Rothwell (1982, p. 28) found that governments became more concerned with problems of stimulating industrial innovation and that by the early 1980s they were “intervening more and more”. Rothwell characterised the UK, together with the US, as being aligned more with the laissez faire model, emphasising general targets and “getting the overall industrial and economic climate right, rather than intervening more directly in the process of

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innovation . . . [S]trategy appears to be left largely in the hands of private companies. Policy tools are available to assist these firms, but technology choice is mainly by managers, the direction of technology being determined by market forces” (1982, p. 28). Research Question 6: Has discourse on government intervention increased? If UK political discourse has largely associated innovation with the private sector and a laissez faire model as Rothwell suggested in the 1980s, and if this has continued, then we are likely to find evidence of the dominance of this ideological discourse when we examine its status as a floating signifier. Otherwise we would expect a balance of private and public sector discourse. Research Question 7: Has innovation discourse maintained a balance between private and public sector discourse? The next section discusses the results drawn from parliamentary debates from 1960 to 2005 prompted by these questions derived as ‘stylised facts’ from the academic literature in the innovation studies field. We take each of the questions in turn and discuss the overall implications of the findings in the penultimate section of this paper.

6. Results Research Question 1: Has the term innovation increased in usage among UK politicians? Research Question 2: Has usage of the term innovation extended to policy domains other than science, technology and innovation? Use of the term innovation in the corpus of parliamentary debate has indeed increased since the 1960s (see Fig. 2). The upward curve matches the use of the term in the academic literature. This can be attributed partly to the accumulation of policy instruments related to innovation over the period and the fact that new rationales and instruments do not necessarily displace established ones in the evolution of policy (Laranja et al., 2008). The sheer number of policies in the UK had grown to encompass over 400 instruments by the 1980s (Barber and Georghiou, 2008). The variety of instruments reflected the sectoral specificity of policies and, although these were later rationalised, innovation became a persistent policy theme. Usage of the term innovation extended to policy domains other than science, technology and innovation as shown in Fig. 4 and Table 1. Innovation is referred to in a growing number of domains, and with the passage of time is no longer restricted to those associated with technology and industry. Table 3 shows that the domains of innovation usage increased from five in the 1960s to 67 in the 2000s. For much of the twentieth century the discourse on innovation in Parliament did not stray much beyond the stable meaning of the term, and during the 1960s and 1970s the word was used in a relatively restricted number of domains. The co-locates of innovation in recent decades, by contrast, show a proliferation of contexts of innovation. This may be due partly to the shift in the UK economy. Service domains became important in the 1990s and 2000s, as reflected, for example, in terms such as ‘accounting innovation’, ‘innovation consultancy’, ‘innovation as business consultancy word’ and ‘innovation in commerce’ during the 1990s, and in the 2000s ‘auditing as innovation’, ‘freight innovation’ and ‘innovation benefiting insurance policy holders’ with some references to the cultural and creative industries (e.g. ‘future innovation in theatre design’ and ‘Sky TV drives innovation’). However, notwithstanding the multiplication of domains in the 2000s, traditional industries associated with innovation continued

to be prominent in the discourse, for instance, ‘innovation in aerospace’, ‘innovation performance of automotive industry’, ‘manufacturing driving innovation’ and ‘innovation important to successful manufacturers’. Nevertheless, there was an awareness of the shifting signification of the term innovation, as reflected, for example, in phrases such as ‘innovation breaking down manufacturing-service barriers’. Our analysis of the parliamentary discourse indicates that innovation has been applied to an increasing variety of policy areas. This result is in line with the academic literature suggesting the growing preference for a ‘policy mix’, whereby innovation policies are not expected to work in isolation. Policies in distinctive domains were understood to require alignment in order to have desirable innovation benefits; for example, educational upgrading may require measures to strengthen social capital in order to lead to economic growth and innovation (Akc¸omak and ter Weel, 2008). Does this spread of the innovation discourse across a range of policy domains over the last 40 years suggest that politicians became cognizant of the systemic nature of innovation and the subtleties of policy mixes? To answer this question, we reflect on our evidence in the light of the stylised facts captured by research questions 3 and 4. Research Question 3: Is innovation discourse predominantly a positive discourse? Based on our analysis of the parliamentary discourse corpus, positive inferences regarding innovation were relatively slow to emerge. References to economic benefits began to appear in the 1980s (e.g. ‘innovation linked investment’ and ‘innovation linked to jobs’). Innovation as a frequent topic within economic discourse appears to catch on in the 1990s with a discourse around how ‘innovation leads to economic success’ and how ‘innovation [is] crucial to long-term economic health’, and with combinations of words such as ‘innovation and export success’. In the 2000s the economic effects of innovation are most frequently in evidence. Innovation is associated with driving the economy, growth and productivity, and with enabling and enhancing competition and competitiveness. The 2000s also saw the discourse about innovation and the environment take off in terms of positive inferences, for instance, ‘Environmental innovation challenge’ ‘Energy use innovation’, ‘innovation and renewable energy’, and ‘Low carbon innovation’. Innovation began to be represented in the discourse as a positive force to tackle increasingly urgent environmental and energy problems. The language associating innovation with positive and indeed an increasing impact was typically understated in the 1960s and 1970s, with the discourse referring to ‘somewhat startling innovation’ and ‘fairly major institutional innovation’. Superlatives arrive in the corpus in the 1990s: for instance, ‘extremely important innovation’ and ‘extremely successful Conservative innovation’. While the discourse suggests that the lack of innovation was something to be aware of in the 1980s, its positive benefits were only really stressed in the 1990s and 2000s. In the 1980s the discourse was couched in terms of ‘innovation is helpful’; in the 1990s it was ‘innovation is crucial’, ‘‘extremely important’, and ‘essential for radical improvement’. There is a sense in the discourse that innovation is about ‘potential’ and is ‘widely accepted’ in the 1990s, while, in the 2000s, the discourse suggests far more certainty that ‘innovation delivers’, that ‘innovation has great impact’, and that it ‘drives the future’ and ‘raises standards’. Positive associations between innovation and other words occur much more frequently in the 1990s and the 2000s. This may be because of increasing awareness of the importance of a ‘policy mix’, but it may also suggest an attempt to use innovation as an enabling device to promote the benefits of new legislation. In the parliamentary corpus, ‘innovation and autonomy’ are linked in the 2000s. For

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Table 3 Trends in the Categories (Nodes refer to the coding nodes from the NVivo analysis; the ratios are calculated from the frequency of coding nodes in each category.). Year Drivers and barriers Driver to barrier node ratio Increasing driver discourse============→ Government policy driver nodes circa Increasing government intervention discourse============→ Positive and negative Positive to negative node ratio Increasing positive discourse============→ Environmental to economic benefit ratio Increasing competition of environmental to economic discourse============→ Domains Domain nodes circa Increasing domain coverage ============→ Public to private domain node ratio Oscillating public to private balance of discourse ↑ ↓ ↑ ↓ ↑ ↓ → Total nodes circa

example, high-performing public sector institutions such as schools or National Health Service Trusts are discussed using a discourse of ‘earned autonomy’ and a relaxation of external monitoring and reporting, which was justified in terms of freeing them to innovate. Similarly, a discourse about ‘innovation and children’ was linked with changes in school curricula, while ‘innovation and energy’ and ‘innovation and partnership’ appear as phrases that seem to infuse legislative programmes with a positive aura of innovation. Turning to negative inferences associated with innovation, historians agree that the decade of the 1980s in the UK was a confrontational period politically (Marr, 2007) and the discourse in the corpus seems to confirm this with accusatory and negative terms making an appearance. When the discourse refers to innovation, it is preoccupied with signalling a perceived lack of innovation, as reflected in phrases such as ‘accused of a lack of innovation’, ‘disappointed at lack of innovation’, and ‘BT lack of innovation comparatively’. In some cases, the discourse links innovation explicitly with the political: ‘lack of innovation in the labour party’, or ‘lack of institutional innovation’. In the 1990s there is evidence of a subtle switch of emphasis from a lack of innovation to a lack of access to innovation; for example, the discourse is of ‘equitable access to innovation’ and a sense of underachievement and wasted opportunity, rather than the absence of innovation (e.g. the ‘potential of biotechnology not being exploited’). In the 2000s, this thread in the discourse strengthens: for example, ‘lack of opportunity for innovation’ or ‘lost opportunity that innovation can bring’, and a concern that there was ‘less innovation and lower choice’ and ‘less innovation and lower quality’. The discourse around a loss of innovation comes to be associated with worries about the modern economy: ‘Not only jobs but innovation and partnerships will be [lost]’. This may reflect acknowledgement by policy makers that innovation may be occurring in the economy, but the necessary links to exploit it are lacking, consistent with the emergence of a ‘systems of innovation’ view in the academic literature. As already mentioned, the 1980s is the only decade in which there is virtually no discourse relating to the negative impact or magnitude of innovation. The corpus for the 1960s and 1970s displays measured and understated negative comments, such as ‘not entirely innovation’, ‘fairly dubious innovation’, and ‘somewhat undesirable innovation’. In the 1990s, perhaps in reaction to the strongly positive associations in the discourse in the 1980s there are a number of negative references to innovation, and these are rather more melodramatic than those found in the 1960s and 1970s: for instance, ‘damaging innovation’, ‘extremely dangerous innovation’, and ‘extremely uncomfortable innovation’. Over time, however,

1960

1970

0

0.5

0

0

30

3.7

6

1

10.3

15.5

0

0

0

0.2

0.7

5

11

23

1.5

15

1

24

1980

1990

2000

3.4

5.1

9.3

2.3

103

51

39

0.8

199

131

67

1.9

371

while the language became sharper, the negative associations of innovation were greatly surpassed by a more positive discourse. Research Question 4: Is the word innovation a floating signifier? Based on the analysis of the corpus, the word innovation seems to acquire the characteristics of a floating signifier, which may be associated with a growing systemic policy mix awareness, but this is less credible when innovation is associated with areas of government policy with which it has not previously been connected. It would appear that in the everyday discourse of parliament innovation becomes a multi-purpose political tool, and the usage of the term in parliamentary debate is looser than the definitions employed by specialist innovation policy makers. Yet even here, there is evidence of a broadening of the definition. John Barber, then at the Department of Trade and Industry, and Geoff White, of the Treasury, wrote in 1987 that “. . .innovation can be thought of as the successful exploitation of technical change” (Barber and White, 1987, p. 25). The Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) and its successors, the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS) and the Department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS), by the 2000s were working with the definition “The successful exploitation of new ideas” (DTI, 2003, p. 8). It seems therefore that the widening of innovation as a floating signifier has been consistent with official government policy. Research Question 5: Has the discourse on drivers increased relative to that on barriers? Table 3 shows a steady increase in the drivers relative to barriers innovation discourse from the 1980s through the 1990s and 2000s. A core category in the analysis of the parliamentary discourse was ‘Attitude and Culture’, and this discourse can be related to the ideal laissez faire and systemic innovation models in the academic literature. The analysis of the corpus data shows that ‘Attitude and Culture’ became important as both perceived drivers and barriers of innovation in the 1980s. The discourse in the Thatcher government period stressed having a ‘constructive attitude to innovation’ and having a ‘balanced attitude to innovation’ for institutions such as firms, unions, public sector monopolies and government (‘Government attitude to innovation’). The discourse suggests a concern that ‘innovation investment requires sustained confidence’. As noted above, the 1980s is the only decade in which there are no negative references about innovation, the only negative associations being about actors and institutions seen as standing in its way. The 1980s Conservative government in the UK is acknowledged as radically laissez faire in its economic policies. The discourse

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in this period expressed a view that in earlier years the State’s managerial powers had reached almost delusional levels (Walker, 1993). In line with this, the discourse in the corpus reflects the desirability of removing barriers to the effective workings of the market and a view that the perceived barriers to innovation were political. ‘Accused’ and ‘attitude’ are the co-locates that appear at this time when actors such as unions were accused of a lack of innovation in their attitude (‘the attitude of unions towards innovation and technological change’). British Telecom was accused of a lack of innovation in debates on its privatisation (“. . .there can be no sustained risk-taking and innovation with a monopoly’). The emphasis in the discourse about policies was on removing the forces blocking innovation and progress. This is consistent with the view that any policy interventions needed to be carefully rationalised by market failure arguments. As Barber and White (1987, p. 26) put it: “Policies are therefore directed more to working with the grain of market forces, and to providing firms with assistance to improve their innovative and competitive capabilities without weakening their commercial responsibility for their own actions and the incentive for them to stand on their own feet. Intervention is directed much more at the objective of correcting failures in the market mechanism rather than towards grand strategies.” In our corpus, competition is associated with the need to ‘drive’, ‘encourage’ and ‘deliver’ innovation’. It may be that innovation was being invoked as a means of justifying politically and economically motivated legislation, perhaps to make its passage easier. This is consistent with our suggestion that the innovation discourse is associated with drivers, but this discourse itself may serve as a driver for policies that may not be closely associated with innovation in the narrower meaning of the term. Following the largely negative discourse of the 1980s, dominated by associations with disincentives that ‘deter’ and ‘stifle’ innovation, the language shifts from a negative discourse to a subtly positive discourse in the 1990s. Talk of disincentives changes to ‘limiting potential for innovation’ and in the 2000s to ‘lost incentives to innovation’. Although there is still evidence of a bemoaning of disincentives, the positive associations may be interpreted as indicative of the media-savvy communications in this period. Yet there is also evidence of a more circumspect attitude to innovation in the 1990s and 2000s, with references to innovation as ‘risky’ and ‘difficult’, and claims that it might be ‘hard to accept’ and is ‘regarded with scepticism’. ‘Innovation fatigue’ appears in the discourse as a barrier in the 1990s. The word associations in the debate become less accusatory and blame-assigning, instead referring to broader notions of ‘culture’ and ‘climate’ rather than the attitudes of actors. In the 1990s, ‘innovation culture’ is associated with the ‘climate for innovation to flourish’, developing into a ‘dynamic environment for innovation’ in the 2000s through ‘community driven innovation’. These patterns in the discourse in the 2000s are in stark contrast to the unreserved promotion of innovation in the 1980s. They may be indicative of a maturing in the understanding of innovation, perhaps influenced by the increasing sophistication of innovation policy and measurement as well as by the thinking of academics. Nevertheless, throughout the four decades analysed here, ‘attitude and culture’ serve as signifiers of both potential drivers and potential barriers to innovation. As Table 3 shows, the ratio of the discourse on drivers to that about barriers has increased at a steady rate over the decades, with the discourse turning towards what stimulates innovation, rather than what blocks it. Research Question 6: Has discourse on government intervention increased? Table 3 shows evidence of an increase in government intervention discourse from the 1980s onwards, consistent with the innovation literature. Notwithstanding a discourse critiquing

government’s inability to innovate, by far the largest category of innovation drivers is ‘Government Policy and Support’. Politicians have not been reticent in stressing the positive impact of their activities on innovation. This result resonates with the broader political engagement with the word innovation. In the 1980s the discourse tended to be negative and defensive, with concerns expressed about ‘protecting innovation’ and ‘protecting UK innovation overseas’, in particular. Innovation was treated as being under threat and in need of support. There are several references to ‘Support for innovation’ in this decade and to ‘aid’, ‘aid programmes’ and ‘adoption of innovation through support programmes. The 1980s also saw the first explicit references to ‘financing innovation’, ‘financial help’ and ‘allocation of funds for’ innovation. For example, the statement “. . .we need to finance our innovation much better then we have. . .” was associated with a systematic portfolio of ‘programmes of innovation’, including specific schemes such as ‘50% innovation grants’ and the ‘East Midlands Innovation Programme’. Small firms become a focus of policy, for instance the ‘Small business innovation research programme’ and the ‘Small company innovation fund’. The discourse on intervention typically suggests expenditure in this period and indicates the increasing combination of public with private financing, as in the Private Finance Initiative (PFI), a form of public-private partnership for sharing risk, with potential benefits reflected in phrases such as ‘PFI as innovation with potential to increase efficiency’ and ‘PFI as innovation with potential to unlock funds’. Research Question 7: Has innovation discourse maintained a balance between private and public discourse? In contrast to the trends discussed so far, the ratio of private to public sector discourse oscillates from decade to decade. Table 3 shows that the discourse of the public sector dominates the 1960s; the private sector appears in the 1970s, the public sector discourse regains its prominence in the 1980s, but it retreats again in the private sector-dominated 1990s, before again taking centre stage in the 2000s. These shifts reflect a lack of consistency in industrial and innovation policy in the UK over the period. There were frequent changes of Ministers and re-locations of responsibility for innovation in short-lived government departments, and the succession of new initiatives may have been overreactions to perceived failures of previous innovation doctrines. The corpus of parliamentary debate for the 1960s contains an incredulous observation about ‘innovation achieved entirely without government’. The 1960s was a political period during which it was believe that the market could not be left to its own devices (Walker, 1993). However, in later decades, and in particular in the 1990s, there are a number of references in the corpus to the private sector as a source of innovation. This can be linked partly to a shift to private finance initiatives in infrastructural projects and operations introduced by Prime Minister John Major’s Conservative government in 1992. The discourse refers to ‘Private finance initiative as innovation’ and ‘private funding for roads as innovation’, and there are numerous references to the innovative benefits of the private sector (e.g. ‘private sector innovation’, ‘private sector’s skills and innovation’ and ‘private sector ideas and innovation’). While ‘private sector’ is a prominent co-locate term in the 1990s, the small business innovation agenda appears throughout the four decades, for example, in the 1970s with ‘small business as sources of innovation’, ‘innovation by small and medium-sized firms’ in the 1990s, and with ‘SMEs driving innovation’ appearing in the 2000s. By contrast to the private sector discourse in the 1990s, in the 2000s the discourse focuses much more on the public sector. With the Blair New Labour government, particularly, in its second term, ‘innovation in the public sector’ became a priority in the discourse of the parliamentary debates, with phrases such as ‘innovation in

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public sector bodies’, ‘innovation in public sector finance’, ‘innovation in health and education’ and ‘innovation in public R&D’.

7. Discussion A striking trend revealed by our analysis of the corpus of parliamentary discourse on innovation over the 45-year period is the increasing proliferation of co-locate terms. This implies that politicians used the word innovation in a restricted way in the early period, largely focusing on the magnitude of innovation (‘rate’, ‘comparatively’). Over time the direction became more important, with increasing numbers of domains (e.g. from heavy industries like ‘aerospace’, ‘automotive’ and ‘construction’ to ‘services and logistics’, ‘finance’, ‘fiscal’, ‘commerce’, ‘freight’ in the 2000s) and stakeholders affected (‘children’, ‘customer’, ‘public’). Our analysis suggests that the meaning of the word innovation was destabilised by policy makers pursuing an increasing range of sectoral policies, which they rhetorically linked to innovation. While there is a stable set of meanings over the decades centred on traditional associations like technology and industry, within each decade there have been numerous new directions and domains of application, many with little or no connection with innovation as understood traditionally. This is partly due to the appearance of new positive associations that provide a ‘halo’ effect enhancing various new political initiatives. The paper shows systematic evidence for the ‘success’ or ‘invasion’ of innovation into areas of previously disconnected areas of public policy, as referred to in recent overviews (Morlacchi and Martin, 2009; Flanagan et al., 2011). The expansion of innovation into other sectoral domains and policy areas has been linked to the increasing complexity and systemic dynamics of innovation, that is, the rise of policy mixes, which traverse departmental boundaries. This expansion raises particular issues in the British case insofar as studies of ‘the UK National System of Innovation’ point to certain distinguishing social tendencies and priorities but not to a distinctive persistent system of innovation. Nick von Tunzelmann put this very succinctly: “In effect the national ‘system’ of innovation in the UK was just not sufficiently systemic.” (2004, p. 331). The fragmented approach to innovation policy in the UK is reflected in the proliferation of co-located signifying words reported in this paper. A consistent and sustained system of innovation is likely to display a more limited number and variety of co-located terms. The ‘systemic-ness’ of the innovation system refers both to the longevity of institutions and to the links between them. ‘Systems of innovation’ scholars have long emphasised the role of productive interactions between industry, the science base, finance, markets and intermediaries, a feature that has been found to be lacking in the UK (Walker, 1993; von Tunzelmann, 2004). As Morlacchi and Martin (2009, p. 578) argue: “. . . the innovative capacity of a nation depends not only on the strength of individual ‘players’ (firms, universities, government research laboratories) but perhaps more importantly on the links between those actors. . .”. The UK has no shortage of bridging institutions (Carlsson and Stankiewicz, 1991), but their effectiveness varies (Sapsed et al., 2007). It might be argued the private/public oscillation around the meaning of innovation over several decades is perhaps partly attributable to an element of desperation in a country in long-term decline in which policies tend to over-compensate for the failures of previous policies, and in which there is a lack of institutional systemic links and interactions in the policy domain. These factors may militate against a discourse and policies favouring evolutionary, rather than spontaneous, innovation (Morlacchi and Martin, 2009).

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Has the systemic consensus shared among innovation scholars diffused among politicians? This requires a deeper discussion of the meanings of innovation as a signifier. Innovation scholars have highlighted the fact that the government’s definition of innovation has broadened from a restrictive one based on technology to one that refers to “the successful exploitation of new ideas”. This broad definition was praised by the 2007 peer review of the innovation policy mix in the EU Member States conducted as part of the CREST (Scientific and Technical Research Committee) programme. In the case of the UK, it suggested that, by covering non-technical innovations such as management practices, service provision, and business models, the UK was in a favourable position, “being able to stimulate, develop and capitalise upon innovation in its broadest sense” (Cunningham, 2007, p. 15). Less charitably, some might argue that the broadening of innovation may be linked to the perceived anti-technology orientation of the UK. Although disputed (Edgerton, 1996), many histories of the UK system agree that there has been a comparative deficiency in UK managers’ ability to see and exploit technological opportunities; they are generally less engineering educated and aware of technology (Pavitt, 1980; Barber and White, 1987; Walker, 1993; von Tunzelmann, 2004; Barber and Georghiou, 2008). While services sectors and productivity had improved and showed dynamism over the 1960s and 1970s traditional technological innovation indicators showed that the UK declined over this period, failing to match the growth in R&D investment of other countries, while the share of world technological output, as measured by patents declined (see above references). Walker (1993) attributes this to a prioritisation of services-retail, property, and finance over manufacturing and technology-reflecting the values of the elite, both in business and in politics. UK preferences represented the opposite pole to Germany and Japan, and contrasting incentives to corporate behaviour with regard to financial markets. During the period that our analysis shows an exponential rise in parliamentary references to innovation, there was a marked relative decline in technological innovation as indicated by the innovation indicators data (von Tunzelmann, 2004). Cynics might argue that the evidence of a floating signification of the word innovation reflects an effort to deflect attention away from areas in which the UK was struggling towards a more flexible definition that could embrace any success story. However, the concept of innovation has been deployed in many areas beyond technology and manufacturing (Freeman and Soete, 2009), suggesting that the exploitation of new ideas is also important for them. Our data suggest a tension between the positive innovation agenda fostered by New Labour – searching for and celebrating innovation everywhere – and the traditional view that notes that innovation only occurs in a percentage of firms, as measured by indicators like the Community Innovation Survey. For some innovation policy makers, New Labour’s enthusiasm for a multifaceted definition of innovation was a dilution such that, “. . .outside of those officials most closely concerned with technology and innovation policy, understanding of the variety of different ways in which innovation takes place was as poor as it had been in the past. Understanding in the wider policy community of the nature of innovation processes was equally poor except for the relative few who took a deep interest in the subject” (Barber and Georghiou, 2008, p. 50). During the hyperbole of the first New Labour term in office calling for policy intervention, spending on the DTI’s Support Schemes for technology and innovation remained flat, with OECD data showing that spending was less than in all other advanced industrialised countries. One response was minor repackaging of various schemes that were announced “for political effect” (Barber and Georghiou, 2008, p. 51) Our analysis suggests that over the four decades there was increasing awareness of policy ideas associated with the ‘systems

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of innovation’ model emphasising linkages, access, partnerships, collaboration and so on. Innovation was present in parliamentary debates across a variety of domains, suggesting the increasing interdependence of policy areas. However, our analysis also reveals the growing ‘performative’ usage of the word innovation. The word innovation has come to be unreservedly used with positive associations signifying a desirable goal. Thus, the successful introduction of novelty is seen as a worthy and important task in itself, and it has therefore become politically expedient to associate innovation with multiple agendas. As our analysis demonstrates, innovation is present in the policy discourse and is interpreted as being positive for knowledge and thinking, providing solutions for the environment crisis, updating public services, educating children, governing health services, and for promoting economic growth and competitiveness. In linguistic terms it derives its meaning from the words with which it is collocated, and the evidence presented here suggests that this meaning has become fragmented to the point where, to paraphrase Shakespeare, it is in danger of coming to signify nothing.

8. Conclusion We have used archival qualitative data to analyse patterns of parliamentary discourse and to reflect on the results in the light of stylised facts derived from the innovation studies literature. Innovation studies researchers have perhaps underutilised available linguistic datasets in their historical studies. We argue that words matter. Word usage signifies the positioning of policies in relation to power and resources, and may be performative when a particular term is used in conjunction with other words in political debate. Using our unique dataset we have shown that the use of the term innovation has grown in importance in political debate, both in absolute numbers and in the range of sectoral domains and policy areas where the discourse is present. Thus, even as the technological indicators showed a relative decline for the UK, the broadening of the meaning of innovation to embrace ‘new ideas’ has propelled its usage. The tone of the policy discourse has been shown to be mostly positive. Consistent with the evidence in the academic literature, innovation appears to have been elevated to almost beatific status, uncritically accepted as progressive and urgent. In the 1970s, innovation was associated causally with environmental problems, whereas contemporary discourse now identifies it as the solution to those problems. The analysis of the discourse relating to drivers and barriers indicates that politicians have become much more concerned with what stimulates innovation, in contrast to the discourse in the 1980s when the removal of barriers to innovation attracted greater attention. This result is consistent with the laissez faire ethos of the Thatcher government, despite the fact that a great many policy interventions were introduced during that period. Indeed, in our analysis, for all decades, the most frequently quoted driver of innovation was government. This may raise some eyebrows among innovation researchers whom are generally sceptical about such a direct government-innovation relationship. Nevertheless a discourse associated with policy intervention increased steadily in the UK, in spite of its characterisation as an exemplar of laissez faire policy in the innovation studies literature. We interpret our evidence in the frame of Lundvall and Borrás’s (2005) ideal types of laissez faire and systemic innovation policy. Over the historical period examined here, we found evidence of increasing use of a discourse referring to co-ordinated linkages, access to innovation and knowledge, and instruments associated with the systems of innovation framework. However, we also found a certain lack of continuity with a discourse that oscillated between

an emphasis on public and private roles in innovation over the four decades. The academic literature on innovation has coalesced around a systemic and evolutionary consensus (Morlacchi and Martin, 2009) that acknowledges the interdependence of policy mixes (Flanagan et al., 2011), but our analysis suggests this has yet to be fully reflected in the thinking of politicians. In particular, it is not clear that ‘systems failures’ have the same weight in the policy discourse as market failures among Members of Parliament and other policy makers. Some academic schools of thought may become embedded ideologically and influence government action, such as in the cases of privatisation and central bank independence (Kogut and Macpherson, 2011). Yet these cases represent specific ideas and policy prescriptions while innovation is much broader and more malleable. Laranja et al. (2008) point to the attractiveness of theoretical ideas with a certain ‘interpretative flexibility’, and it may be that the floating signification of innovation is the source of its increasing usage. We conclude that much of the reference to innovation owes more to political expediency and to its ‘halo effect’ than the embrace of systems of innovation thinking. Barber and Georghiou (2008) argue that there is a lack of appreciation of the subtler points of innovation dynamics among parliamentarians because, like British managers, they lack technical and engineering knowledge. The preponderance of parliamentarians are trained in politics, law, economics and the humanities with just over 10% with degrees in sciences and technology, engineering, and medicine disciplines combined11 This suggests that innovation policy in the UK suffers from a lack of a well-informed and equipped legislature such that, as Barber and Georghiou (2008, p. 67) argue: “. . .there has been an absence of an informed community of stakeholders providing the ballast needed to prevent inadequately considered policy changes from being implemented.” Nevertheless with the increased references to linkages, knowledge, clusters and collaboration and related policies there is some evidence that a more accurate understanding of innovation among politicians may be emerging, but perhaps only slowly. This raises the issue that this a UK-oriented study and it is worth considering how representative it may be of other settings. The method of analysing keywords within legislative texts would similarly reveal trends in meaning and usage for other countries. These we would expect to vary in terms of stability of the term, spread of domains and the frequency of usage. Having said this, OECD countries show consistencies in innovation policy. They are argued to have embedded a model of institutional functions that have persisted with the shift from a science to innovation focus, as well as the shift from ‘linear’ to ‘systems’ (Henriques and Larédo, 2013). However the ways these technical functions are arranged and delivered has changed radically with changes in government. For example, Dosso (2013) suggests recent years in France’s innovation policy have seen experimental trial and error including a broadening of actors, after a longer period of persistence and specialisation (Dosso, 2012). Anecdotal suggestions from colleagues suggest the same is true in Germany but this really would require research in these countries legislatures. In summary we cannot generalise that the trends observed in UK historical discourse would be replicated in other countries. We have been arguing that the broadening of innovation is partly influenced by the prevailing industry and business structural changes in the UK and these have been quite different in other countries. Other limitations beyond the UK-centrism are threefold: firstly the parliamentary data is undifferentiated; we do not have the

11 http://www.parliamentaryrecord.com/content/statAnalysis/by-education. aspx.

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references to innovation filtered by potentially revealing categories such as which political party the MPs represented, or whether the references were made by Ministers responsible for innovation policy compared to backbenchers. The first case could reveal the effects of ideology, or alternatively that political party made little difference to the usage of innovation. The second may show some crucial differences with regard to depth of understanding of innovation. This paper has analysed the general zeitgeist of discourse but differentiating the data in these ways are potentially worthwhile heuristics for further research that could provide nuance. A second limitation is that in order to create a basis for temporal comparison we have analysed the data by the two extremes of those co-locates that occurred in every decade and those that only occurred in one decade. By design this highlighted the key patterns, but necessarily it may have excluded subtler changes in meaning. Similarly arranging the data by different time periods, such as government term of office, may reveal further nuances in the data. For example, Conservative or Labour ideological dominances may be identified. Thirdly our dataset covers the period until 2005 before the financial crisis. We might expect that the discourse on innovation in financial instruments following the crash may have served to dampen the strongly positive trend we found in the preceding decades. Other suggestions for further research are international comparisons, as mentioned above. Results from specific research questions may be fruitful, for example it would be interesting to see whether the public-private oscillation is an effect that is found in other strongly dyadic and antagonistic political party systems, as compared with countries more familiar with coalition government. Other intriguing comparisons would be to contrast the parliamentary data with text from White Papers, speeches, policy reports, and texts from business speakers to understand the particularities of different communities’ discourse on innovation. This paper is the first to analyse systematic evidence on the political discourse of innovation over an extended period of modern British history. By extracting and analysing words co-located with innovation in Hansard, the UK’s parliamentary record, we used linguistic techniques to show stable and changing usage of the word innovation among the politicians’ community. Testing ‘stylised facts’ in innovation policy studies the paper found innovation has increased in usage; it has entered a great variety of domains and policy areas; it has been increasingly seen as a positive force; it has focused on drivers and barriers to innovation, with an increasing emphasis on government as driver; yet discourse has oscillated from public to private sector in the UK. The innovation studies community can take encouragement from a growing awareness of ‘Systems of Innovation’ approaches and the general ascendancy of the innovation concept. There is however a need for vigilance against the word being diluted or distorted in the service of a plethora of unrelated policy agendas, which would ultimately undermine its power as a signifier.

Acknowledgements This work was partly funded by Jonathan Sapsed’s Innovation Fellowship in the Advanced Institute of Management Research (AIM), supported by ESRC and EPSRC (RES-331-27-0021). In preparing this manuscript, we are grateful for the insights of John Barber, Mark Beatson, Robert Blackburn, Sara Carter, Gordon MacKerron, Susan Marlow, Margaret Sharp, Ed Steinmueller, Nick von Tunzelmann and the participants of the NickFest conference at the Freeman Centre, 29th-30th March, 2010, and in a seminar at the Manchester Institute of Innovation Research on 23rd May, 2011. We would especially like to thank Dr. Charles Dannreuther, the co-author on the related work (Perren and Dannreuther, 2012 and Dannreuther and Perren, 2013), for his contribution to the overall

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