Innovation policies for the emerging cyber-physical world: a research agenda.

The emergence of a 'cyber-physical world', defined as the profound entrenchment of physical and digital processes, has revolutionised modalities of production and consumption of products and services, radically changing the landscape for individuals, firms and organisations. Embracing this paradigmatic change requires a creative leap as the behaviour of agents, aggregated structures and their relationships have been completely reshaped. Up-to-date innovation policies suffer from cognitive rigidities that impede escape from traditional instruments and concepts. With this paper, we aim to fill this gap, conceptualising the disruptive emergence of the cyber-physical world and its impact on innovation policies. We use a two-step methodology based on the critical realist approach. The first step concerns the application of the explanatory model of social science to infer the causes, properties and consequences of the cyber-physical world. The second step exploits the results of the first as a departure point, using congruence analysis to demonstrate mismatches between existing innovation policy frameworks and the emergent cyber-physical world, and to propose new driving principles to reframe theoretical, methodological and strategic elements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]