As of 2010, the OECD countries spent over $968 billion annually on research and development (R&D), with China spending another $179 billion, Russia $32 billion and Taiwan $24 billion. Evidently, the world’s policymakers have concluded that investment in R&D is a key to their future economic growth. As globalisation takes place, and developing countries increasingly show their ability to compete in labour-intensive manufactures, the race is on to develop new innovations that will create high skill, high productivity employment. President Obama’s championing of electric cars, alternative energy research and other high technology ventures is mirrored in efforts around the global to win the innovation race. But how such efforts should be organised is very much open to debate. This paper reviews in depth perhaps the fastest growing perspective, namely the Triple Helix. In June 2013, a Google search for ‘Triple Helix innovation’ revealed 281,000 hits. A library search gave over 1300 citations in books and papers using the same terms. An international association, TripleHelix.org, organises an annual conference featuring thousands of participants from academia, government and business. All of this indicates that the Triple Helix has become one of, if not the, most widely used perspectives on innovation. However, there are some major shortcomings with the approach, in particular its applicability to policy situations.