Throughout his career, Freeman was concerned with how innovation could both enslave and liberate humanity, and found it important that innovation policy be aligned with human values. Around 1980, Freeman took part in developing a neo-Schumpeterian approach to the study of innovation on the background of debates on the long waves of capitalist development, which also related to wider questions of the nature of capitalism. At about the same time, Freeman developed an approach to issues of international competitiveness that could challenge neoclassical orthodoxies, and in which he synthesised a Schumpeterian view of the cyclical nature of economic development with Listian political economy, in a concept of the national system of innovation. By the late 1980s, however, Freeman had become highly critical of what he saw as Schumpeter’s overly theoretical and economistic approach. Excising these aspects of Schumpeterian thought, Freeman and other innovation scholars could find that innovations pertain not only to the economic system, but to more or less all societal institutions. This view undergirds the theory mission-oriented innovation. Listian approach to matters of direction of innovation is maintained, which also serves as a basis for critical engagement with neoclassical thought today.