Structural innovations : Towards a unified perspective?

This article argues that the intervention to generate structural innovations and with it the structural interaction between organisation actors can be understood as attempts to tackle system failures in innovation systems, mainly as regards networking and actor capabilities. However, these interventions are challenging, they often rest on simplistic assumptions on interaction and networking needs and potentially generate dysfunctional systemic effects. These challenges are discussed using illustrations of structural innovations to improve industry-academic collaborations in the UK and Germany. The article then concludes with a conceptual and policy discussion of opportunities, challenges and unintended consequences of deliberate structural innovation and intervention in structural interaction.