Erkki Karo
Erkki Karo is an Associate Professor of Science and Technology Policy and the Head of the Nurkse Department. He has earned a BA in Public Administration from the University of Tartu and a PhD in Technology Governance from Tallinn University of Technology. During his PhD studies, he also acted as a visiting researcher at KU Leuven (Belgium), the University College London (UK), and the University of Iceland. Next to his appointments at TalTech, from 2015 to 2016, he worked as JSPS post-doctoral fellow at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (Japan). From 2018 to 2022, he served as the President of the Estonian Economics Association and a member of the Government Innovation Policy Council. He is a member of the TalTech Senate, the supervisory board of Science Park Tehnopol, and FabCity Foundation. He is also the co-chair of the Permanent Study Group on Public Administration, Technology and Innovation at the European Group for Public Administration (EGPA). Erkki has consulted many public sector organisations including the European Commission (DG Regio), the Estonian Government (several ministries), and the City of Tallinn. In his research and policy advisory functions Erkki focuses on the governance of science, technology, and innovation (STI) policies and systems with a particular application of STI in tackling complex societal challenges (e.g. SDGs), green/sustainability transition, and developing human centric (smart) cities, etc. His recent publications include Innovation Bureaucracy: How agile stability creates the Entrepreneurial State (with Rainer Kattel and Wolfgang Drechsler; Yale University Press, forthcoming in 2022); Innovation and the state: towards an evolutionary theory of policy capacity (with Rainer Kattel; In Policy Capacity and Governance; Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2018) and Mission-oriented innovation policies and bureaucracies in East Asia (Industrial and Corporate Change, 2018).
