Abstract:The notion of the bioeconomy has gained importance in both research and policy debates over the last decade, and is frequently argued to be a key part of the solution to multiple grand challenges. Despite this, there seems to be little consensus concerning what bioeconomy actually implies. Consequently, this paper seeks to enhance our understanding of what the notion of bioeconomy means by exploring the origins, uptake, and contents of the term "bioeconomy" in the academic literature. Firstly, we perform a bibliometric analysis that highlights that the bioeconomy research community is still rather fragmented and distributed across many different fields of science, even if natural and engineering sciences take up the most central role. Secondly, we carry out a literature review that identifies three visions of the bioeconomy. The bio-technology vision emphasises the importance of bio-technology research and application and commercialisation of bio-technology in different sectors of the economy. The bio-resource vision focuses on processing and upgrading of biological raw materials, as well as on the establishment of new value chains. Finally, the bio-ecology vision highlights sustainability and ecological processes that optimise the use of energy and nutrients, promote biodiversity, and avoid monocultures and soil degradation.

a b s t r a c tWhile there is growing awareness that much innovation currently takes place in the public sector, it is also recognised that more systematic efforts to promote innovation are needed to address the economic and societal challenges that public sectors face. However, there is a lack of a common understanding of what public sector innovation is and a lack of a measurement framework that can shed light on innovation processes in public sector organisations. Based on insights generated in a recent Nordic pilot study, this paper seeks to contribute to fill this gap. The paper discusses how public sector innovation can be captured and to what extent measurement can be based on frameworks originally developed in a private sector context. While there are important differences between the public and the private sector that should be reflected in a measurement framework, there is also considerable common ground that can be drawn upon.

The evolutionary turn in economic geography has shed new light on historically contingent regional preconditions for innovation and economic growth, which has the potential of improving the analytical input to regional innovation system approaches. Evolutionary economic geography has renewed interest in and sharpened the conceptual lens on firms, their organizational routines and knowledge bases as well as the long-term, self-sustaining development dynamics, which may arise from their co-location in regions. At the same, it has been pointed out that an overreliance on imported evolutionary frameworks (such as Nelson and Winter's theory of the firm and their lack of an explicit social ontology) may lead to a 'theoretical relegation' of institutions and agency. It seems also that the policy agenda of evolutionary economic geography has remained largely implicit. In comparison, regional innovation system has been developed in closer interaction with policy-makers and has been used widely as a framework for the design, implementation and evaluation of regional innovation policies in a variety of countries and regions. The purpose of this article is to critically investigate what evolutionary economic geography brings to the policy table, and how this potentially can advance a regional innovation systems approach. The article specially focuses on how this may improve the capacity of policies based on a regional innovation system framework to support new path development (i.e. path renewal and path creation) to secure regional resilience.

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Public sector innovation is often seen through the lens of private sector frameworks. This paper discusses to what extent the innovation typology derived from the private sector is appropriate for public sector contexts. Based on classification of 1536 examples of public sector innovations, the paper finds that a considerable share was best classified as bricolage or incremental change, while many others encompass multiple types of innovations and systemic innovations. The paper argues that measurement frameworks should better reflect this heterogeneity of learning and innovation in the public sector.