Making sense of wickedness: Directionality heuristics for challenge-led innovation policy
提出方向性启发式方法这一概念，帮助理解政策制定者如何解读和应对挑战导向创新政策中的棘手问题，并以荷兰使命导向的顶尖部门和创新政策为例进行说明。
This article contributes to the burgeoning literature on directionality challenges by introducing directionality heuristics as a lens to conceptualize how policymakers and other stakeholders interpret and respond to problems in challenge-led innovation policy. Our starting point is that the “wickedness” of problems is strongly shaped by subjective and context-specific perceptions. We therefore utilize and adapt a sense-making framework, originally developed in the management literature, to distinguish different ways in which actors engage with the complexity and uncertainty of such problems. Building on this perspective, we conceptualize directionality heuristics as domain-specific rules of thumb that guide how policymakers interpret and address problems. We demonstrate the usefulness of this concept by applying it retrospectively to the Dutch Mission-oriented Topsector and Innovation Policy. The illustration highlights how stakeholders' differing views on the wickedness of problems translate into particular directionality challenges as well as suitable practices to address those. We conclude by outlining three key propositions, which emphasize the main conceptual contributions and provide concrete paths for future research and policy. • Sense-making helps to understand how policymakers view and tackle wicked problems. • Directionality heuristics are mental shortcuts used to interpret and address problems. • Different degrees of wickedness call for different directionality heuristics. • Nescience creates additional directionality challenges for challenge-led policies.