This contribution contains a summary and a conclusion of the special issue ‘Innovation and government: a bad marriage or a fertile relation’. Innovation is said to be not the core quality of government. However, we found that government is actually good in innovation, albeit not in an obvious way. Government has a complex position when it comes to innovation. Sometimes innovation may be seen as a public value. However, innovation usually also involves conflict with other public values that civilians expect government to secure. This the innovation dilemma is that government ought to be both favour and innovation and fight its negative consequences to other public values. The four contributions show how governments deal with this dilemma. They first move along with the innovation and then redefine their positions by for instance developing new instruments, bundling private initiatives or framing private initiatives to large programmes.@en