An investigation of the UK micro- and nano- technology government intervention

This study investigates a recent UK Government Intervention established to develop Micro- and Nano- Technologies (MNTs) for technology-based economic growth. While the need for such innovation policies is well recognised, there is also a need to understand the key challenges to developing effective policy interventions for the innovation process that will create sound economic leverage (Harvey, 2010). A new method that helps us understand the innovation process at the organisational level has been developed, by working across disciplines and synthesising different methodologies. Constructs adopted from the Minnesota Innovation Research Programme (MIRP) were used to gather and analyse data. The methodological approach followed was a fusion of the Interactive Process Perspective (IPP) and Institutional Theory (IT). This method has been used to further explain the complexities of the innovation process by demonstrating the co-operation and contestation between actors from different interest groups in terms of agency and structure. Evidence of how innovation centres exhibit different characteristics relating to their local context along with the specific actors populating them is provided. Those actors bring their own institutional logics, belief systems and associated practices to their centres. The importance which the local context of an MNT Centre has within the extra-local context of the state intervention is shown to have a major bearing on its original purpose. For practitioners some important points have been raised: the intended purpose of the MNT government intervention was shown to evolve across MNT centres; the key influential actors of each centre demonstrably followed different institutional systems of reasoning, which in some cases resulted in internal conflicts. As demonstrated in this study, the ingrained institutional thinking and reasoning of actors can be difficult to change for the intended purpose of an intervention, once funding has already been awarded.