Offentligt stöd till innovationer : Hur resonerar de offentliga stödgivarna?

The purpose with this essay is to study the public support givers view of the concept innovation and to study how the public support givers discuss and act around the division of public support to entrepreneurs innovations. The purpose is further to describe if the division of public support favour or not favour environmental innovations and to examine if the public support givers consider the industry for environmental innovations is profitable for the society’s economy. We have done several case studies where we have interviewed eight public support. Support givers in this essay are defined as public authorities and other organisations on local, national and/or international level that gives public support to innovations. The public support givers that take part of the essay is VINNOVA, ALMI Stockholm, Innovationsbron, Energimyndigheten, SU Holding AB, KTH Holding, Västra Götalandsregionen and MISTRA. Our theoretical starting point is Silverman and Baums theory ”Picking Winners or Building Them”. They discuss if external support givers act like scouts, who are experts on finding winning companies, or if the external support givers act like coaches and have a more advisory roll and help the companies to become winners. Our conclusions are that an innovation is an idea that is possible to comers and that it also has taken the step towards commercial. When you look at the support givers support processes they take in consideration different characteristics that the entrepreneur should possess, like the team behind the innovation and the innovation itself, when they decide who to give support to. At the same time they help entrepreneurs with guidance and coaching. Therefore they act both as scouts and coaches. The majority of the support givers don’t focus on a specific industry. Three support givers focus though more or less on environmental innovations. Public support is very important for the Swedish industry. It is important for the possibility for innovations to succeed since other external support givers like venture capitalists and banks don’t give support in the early innovation face. An important factor with public support givers is that they don’t focus on getting refund on invested capital. They public support givers want their actions to favour the society. Finally our essay shows that the public support givers neither favour nor not favour environmental innovations. They consider environmental innovations to be an industry that is profitable from an economic point of view but it should not be the only industry Sweden ought to invest in