Education, Training, and Skills Formation

The main question that guides this chapter is how governments are focusing (and must focus) on competence-building (education, training, and skills formation) when designing and implementing innovation policies. After a brief literature review, this chapter suggests a typology of internal/external and individual/organizational sources of competences that are related to innovation activities. This serves to examine briefly the most common initiatives that governments are taking in this regard. The chapter identifies three common overall obstacles and barriers in innovation systems in terms of education, training, and skills formation: the insufficient levels of skills and competences in a system, the time lag between firms’ short-term needs for specific competences and the long time required to develop them, and the imbalances between internal and external sources of competences in firms. From these, the chapter elaborates a set of overall criteria for the (re)design and choice of policy instruments that address those obstacles and barriers.