Policy Learning and Policy Development in Innovation Policy: Canada's Global Innovation Clusters Initiative

This article argues that policy learning is essential for effective innovation policy. The ability to learn from past experiments in a reflexive fashion is a prerequisite for effective policy design. The article responds to the call for more applied research to compliment the theoretical framing of policy learning in the literature. Canada's Innovation Supercluster Initiative, introduced with great fanfare in 2017 and substantially revised in 2022 as the Global Innovation Clusters, offers a relevant case study. Lessons from the federal government's previous experience with national cluster policy were overlooked, in the effort to introduce a flagship initiative for Canada's Innovation and Skills Plan. The article argues that this shortcoming may reflect a deeper institutional issue with how Canada's public service is organized to retain and transmit the lessons from previous policy experiments.