This paper provides a way to summarise the understanding of innovation in contemporary policy debates. The notion of science and technology as an economic and industrial policy tool can be said to have surfaced around the 1950’s. The cluster of dominant views on how innovation worked and could be influenced came, later on, to be known has the “Linear model”, a perspective that has not stopped influencing the agenda ever since. In the 1980’s a major re-reading of the mechanics of the innovation process matured and was crystallised in what became known as “chain-linked” mode. By the 2000’s a significant stock-pile of theoretical insights and empirical evidence concerning the nature and nurture of innovation had accumulated to suggest a substantial up-date and revision of the concept of innovation. The paper compares and contrasts these conceptual models in a sequential way, and ends by describing and explaining the rational for a “multi-channel model.”

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Inovação