knowledge is a variable that is difficult to observe and if so, measuring the effectiveness of the
instruments would suffer from great methodological problems. Given these restrictions, an evaluation has
been carried out. It was observed that Syntens achieves good results in reaching new clients and a large
share of the companies that have been in contact with Syntens, have increased their innovation effort.
Because of the risk of reverse causality, these results should be interpreted carefully, but nevertheless
they seem to indicate that government action in this area leads to positive results. Areas where the
evaluation found room for improvement is that Syntens could focus more on cooperation with branch
organisations and between small- and medium businesses with universities and other knowledge
institutions. In addition, a more structured evaluation process has been started up, with recurrent
evaluation moments.
d) Increasing the number of starting companies that focus on knowledge development.
This category of innovation policy focuses on the relative low number of starters in innovative sectors.
Again, the actual problems and the existence of market failures are difficult to establish. However, the
low number of technostarters may partly stem from information problems with potential starters about
the possibilities to commercialize business concepts or information problems with potential investors
about the viability of the starting companies. These information problems lead to high search and
monitoring costs and are also responsible for the relative scarce availability of venture capital.
Information problems that are present are addressed by a comprehensive approach under the name of
Technopartner. This programme focuses on mobilising venture capital, giving support to companies in
setting up a professional patent policy and creating a platform for starting companies for information
sharing and problem solving. Technopartner has only recently been introduced, so an assessment of the
effectiveness is not available. However, an ex-ante evaluation has been made to make a more structured
evaluation in the near future possible.
Technopartner has arisen from streamlining of several different facilities, which were found not to be
effective enough. One of the main problems was that within these facilities the government played a too
important and decisive role. Private parties were hesitant to co-finance or did not have enough incentives
to take over the role as shareholder in a later stage of the life cycle. These problems partly follow from
the government failure of making right selections. Within the new approach of technopartner, the
investment decision has been moved more towards private parties.
5.2. Conclusion
With regard to innovation, several market failures potentially exist and mostly relate to external effects,
information problems and high search and transaction costs. However, the actual occurrence or
magnitude of these market failures are not always fully known. To provide a good basis for innovation
policy a regular evaluation of the most important problems is carried out. Subsequently, the design of
innovation policy is linked to the identified problems and the instruments are designed in such a way that
they can address the potential market failures, so in theory these instruments should be able to make a
contribution to an increase in social welfare. However, evidence about the effectiveness is rare, difficult
to obtain and hampered by methodological problems.
6. Policy implications
Our previous analysis shows that when it comes to the actual design or measuring the effectiveness of
specific instruments, authorities suffer from information problems. In this paragraph we look at the
policy implications.