Transformative innovation policy in the making: how directionality has emerged for mobility as a service in Finland

It is urgent that an understanding of “directionality” within innovation policies is pursued. A new generation of transformative and mission-oriented innovation policies has gained popularity, promising to realign societies’ innovative activities with societal challenges. This debate comprises different theoretical arguments about achieving directionality but lacks empirical cases that examine the unfolding of policies. This chapter addresses the case of mobility as a service in Finland and explores how a clear and globally relevant direction developed from related policies, showing six elements that were pertinent for the emergence of directionality. The results show a gradual, multi-actor process, combining the emergent process envisaged by transformative innovation policy (TIP) with attempts to streamline actors commonly associated with mission-oriented innovation policies (MOIP). This research highlights that the distinction between these two approaches may be more fluid than previously thought. Studying the processes through which directionality emerges is a fruitful analytic strategy for examining the concrete unfolding of such policies.