Policy Entrepreneurs, Entrepreneurial Strategies, and Institutional Contexts in Interreg Europe

In their efforts to affect policy change, policy entrepreneurs employ a series of strategies, which have been well documented in the literature. However, little is known regarding the relationship between the type of strategies policy entrepreneurs use and the institutional contexts in which they operate. The Interreg Europe programme aims to promote policy changes and thus offers a space for policy learning and experimentation to policy entrepreneurs. Using a mixed methodology that includes a survey addressed to the 65 Interreg Europe projects in research and innovation during the programming period 2014-2020 and 12 follow-up semi-structured interviews, this article explores the strategies used by policy entrepreneurs in different institutional contexts. The study, rare in the policy entrepreneurship scholarship with its quantitative aspects, highlights the most widely used strategies by policy entrepreneurs in research and innovation policy changes. Findings suggest that the strategy of storytelling is more widely used in high innovator regions than in low innovator regions as well as in Northern European compared to Southern European regions. Moreover, there are significant differences between the use of the strategy of storytelling with the perceived ease of policy entrepreneurs to introduce a policy change