STATE OWNED ENTERPRISES AS INSTRUMENTS OF INNOVATION POLICY

This article expands the literature on the rationales and governance of state owned enterprises (SOEs). We show that SOEs could be seen as instruments of innovation policies and change agents within broader innovation systems that can overcome many of the conventional challenges of innovation policy and its implementation, from coordination and implementation of policies and innovation system actor networks to financing innovation. We review the existing literature on the rationales of SOEs and extend it to include innovation as a central rationale. Thereafter we provide a taxonomy that reveals the necessary policy and managerial conditions and constraints for using SOEs as instruments of innovation policy. We place some of the better‐known innovation‐oriented SOE successes and failures into this taxonomy and show that this approach will allow in future research to explore different SOE practices and potential for using SOEs as innovation policy instruments across countries.