Exploring the Underlying Factors of Innovation Policy Failure

This paper holds this conviction that some failures of innovation policy can be attributed to the political context hosting that innovation system. Accordingly, to understand the root causes of these failures, researchers have to step out of the innovation system approaches and study the political system structure and evaluate the policies based on this study. The paper, then, build an eclectic model by bridging between the stakeholder model of public policy evaluation and the three archetypes of political system structure. The paper argues that the new and eclectic model can be applied to evaluate the general public policies by its process, content and the political according to MCconnel’s theory. However, this model has some shortcomings because it is not backed by innovation theories. That is why, in the second phase, another and more developed model; the eclectic –functional model was built based on the components of innovation system, especially the function 4, the guidance of the research. It shows how the imbalance of political system structure, among the civil society and market and the State reflects on the dynamism of interactions among the structure and functional components of an innovation system and gridlocks the related innovation policies. The paper concludes with a case study on biofuel policy failure in Iran.