Innovation policy is a part of the state's public policies and represents a strong link between knowledge and economic growth. It is connected with other public policies, and its development is important because innovations improve the country in an economic, political, and social sense. This paper approaches the topic of innovation policy through a case study - with the aim of analyzing problems in Croatian innovation policy and identifying their causes. The goal is to connect causes with consequences, that is, to answer the question - How can we explain the state of innovation policy in Croatia? The infrastructure of the economy that leads to innovation will be analyzed in order to identify the main obstacles to the development of innovation policy in Croatia. The theoretical starting point is the idea of "path dependence", present in the political science literature on new institutionalism, which dictates that policies and institutional choices established in a specific historical period largely determine the arrangement of state institutions and its policies in the present. Many authors connect this idea with the formation of public policies in countries of the transitional past, such as Croatia. Through the analysis of available existing literature on the subject, but also through interviewing economic actors, i.e. representatives of Croatian companies, the influence of various factors, but also of established institutional frameworks and political practice, which is extremely resistant to changes in its environment, will be examined.