This article aims to clarify and improve thinking on normative government laboratories: partly publically funded laboratories that work to improve the functioning of society, particularly through boosting innovation. This article focuses on a case study of TNO, a large Dutch laboratory, and an exemplary case of this type of laboratory. This article argues that TNO is perceived as a plug to fill a gap between knowledge production and use, in a belief that there is a direct and causal link between (...) laboratory knowledge production and use. As a plug to fill a gap, however, TNO, and laboratories like it, can never perform satisfactorily, making an enduring cycle of negative performance evaluations and major reorganizations inevitable. This article suggests that a network model of innovation might provide a way out of the impasse. (shrink)

Today universities are increasingly seen as motors of innovation: they not only need to provide trained manpower and publications to society, but also new products, new processes and new services that create firms, jobs, and economic growth. This function of universities is controversial, and a huge and still expanding literature has tried to understand it. The approach of this paper is integrative; it uses the existing literature to answer a number of straightforward questions about the creation of innovations with university (...) knowledge production: how does this happen, to what extent, and if it is desirable. In this way this article grounds the issue. Creating innovation with university knowledge production is relevant, justified and important but this has not been, is not and will not become the core function of universities. The existing literature, in other words, overestimates the importance of university knowledge production - in general, and for innovation in particular. (shrink)