How to craft a mission? A Theory of Action for the strategic public management of mission-oriented innovation policy

This paper explores the role of strategic public management within mission-oriented innovation policy. While recent scholarship has emphasised multiple aspects of missions, the distinct relevance of strategic public management in their implementation remains under-explored. To address this gap, the paper performs two complementary tasks. First, it uses a qualitative meta-synthesis of the relevant innovation literature to articulate a new Theory of Action for the analysis of missioncraft: namely, the institutional work public managers perform to create or maintain (disrupt) institutional logics supporting (hinder) their effective implementation. Second, it leverages a pre-study of the extant literature to illustrate the Theory of Action with three historical vignettes showing how the ToA can be applied at different scales and under different institutional logics (US' DARPA; China's NEV Plan programme; and EU's RIS3). Overall, the paper argues that the implementation of mission-oriented innovation policy requires public managers to adopt three critical strategic roles: i) enabling strategic learning across the public sector organisations leading the mission; ii) enabling dynamic accountability in the portfolio of projects supported by the mission; and iii) enabling collaborative innovation among the societal actors partaking the mission. By shifting the focus on the micro-foundations of mission implementation from structural underpinnings (i.e., legal, organisational, managerial) to agentic functions (i.e., strategic roles), the paper provides a new diagnostic lens for innovation policy research and practice – reflecting whether and how public managers can support mission-oriented innovation policy in light of the context-specific opportunities and constraints they face in their institutional work.