The subject of this research is the innovation policy in Croatia in the period 2006 - 2016. in the specific socio-economic context of Europeanization and the economic-financial crisis. The aim of the research was to find out which ideas contain the "primordial soup" of the Croatian innovation policy arena, what are the characteristics of the institutional context in which they travel, how and which discourses they create, and how in a given case the discourse influences the public policy processes, i.e. the success of discursively mediated ideas in their arrival on the policy agenda. By applying the method of critical discourse analysis on the collected research material from semi-structured interviews with policy actors and written policy documents, the analysis has shown that for the achievement of the position of power of political officials and civil servants, the idea of knowledge economy as a fundamental idea present in innovation policy, was only normatively accepted due to the EU membership conditionality, in order to legitimize policy actors' interests, while the existing background ideas are those of economy of scale and industrial mass production which negatively affect the ability for policy change and creation of an integrated innovation policy. Industrial discourse becomes the dominant discourse, and innovation policy comes on the agenda through bureaucratic discourse because new problems, new solutions and "windows of opportunity" in this case are successfully matched through the prism of available sources of funding. Knowledge, which the actors involved in the process of innovation policy making have, is created within the framework of discourse formation, leading to the adaptation of the interpretation of innovation policy that the actors have with the aim of gaining power, whereby the EU's competitiveness discourse serves as a support. Power is gained by the control of discourse that is normatively appropriate in the institutional environment. Research has shown that ideas, interests and institutions have a constitutive and complementary role in public policy change and discourse serves as a linkage. A policy idea arrives on the political agenda when ideas, interests and institutional context are successfully matched in the dynamic process of competition for power in which mechanisms of power are created via discourse.