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How do entrepreneurs of high-growth firms in small, open economies evaluate innovation policy mixes? In response to market consolidation by large firms, governments in such countries are using a mix of innovation policy tools to support firms with high-growth potential in digitally intensive sectors. Government objectives, however, are not being realized. Bringing actor-centric perspectives to the policy mix literature, we analyze interviews with entrepreneurs from Canadian technology firms to determine whether there is a disconnect between the objectives and instruments employed by the government. With distinct policy preferences rooted in their growth experiences specific to the country’s political economy, we find that scale-up entrepreneurs prefer a more active role of the government in the form of demand-side, direct, and targeted innovation instruments. The findings presented in this article provide a more nuanced understanding of the innovation policy landscape and the preferences of technology scale-up firms

On November 14 2012, the European Union (EU) issued a proposal toimplement a directive obligating publicly listed companies to meet a 40 percent quota for female representation on their boards of directors by 2020. This proposal is evidence of a break with historically dominant forms of governance employed in the policy areas of employment equality and corporate composition. Accordingly, this paper elucidates the proposed gender quota’s impact on the dominance of three forms of governance employed in the policy areas of employment equality and corporate composition, namely: regulatory, coordination, and Gender Mainstreaming forms of governance. This analysis yields the conclusion that the success of Gender Mainstreaming as the driving force of the proposal also facilitated a shift from coordination towards regulatory forms of governance in the two policy areas. The true significance of these findings has yet to be determined as this proposal may mark either a permanent shift or an historical anomaly in EU governance in the policy areas of  employment equality and corporate composition.