Mission-Orientation and the Issue of Defining Research Missions: Bottom-Up and Top-Down

In recent years, implementing mission-oriented innovation policies to address grand societal challenges has been pursued in various countries. As a result, there has been a substantial increase in theoretical discussions about the policies and related issues. One difficulty with mission-oriented innovation policies is their centralized character in challenge identification and mission definition. Identifying grand challenges and defining missions within a mission-oriented innovation policy are seen as centralized and top-down. There are several objections to the top-down approach to defining missions. Some researchers also argue that although traditional mission-oriented innovation policies embed a top-down approach in defining missions, it is not the case with modern mission-oriented policies that aim to address grand societal challenges and have diffusion-oriented and bottom-up aspects. However, the alternative bottom-up approach is also subject to several objections. In this paper, after considering the objections the top-down and/or bottom-up approaches encounter, a combined approach to challenge identification and mission definition is proposed based on the requirements a research mission should fulfill, which does not face the problems of the existing approaches.