Roots and Types of Innovation Bureaucracies

This chapter discusses modern public organisations aiming to support innovation and technological advancement that emerged largely during the nineteenth century. It covers key trends that help explain the birth of modern innovation bureaucracy in the West, such as the evolution of knowledge networks through learned bodies and the emergence of polytechnics and engineering education. It also reviews the emergence of a professional managerial class both in private companies and in the public sector, rise and importance of various business associations in the late nineteenth century, and the importance of state-owned companies for managing strategic trade roots and imperial ambitions. The chapter explains how the key trends engender all the forms of modern innovation bureaucracies. It points out how innovation bureaucracies resemble the Weber thesis formalised in the 1980s by scholars trying to understand East Asian development.