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In this study, we investigate the preferences for private electric vehicle (EV) charging among households without a private residential charging option. We seek to understand which attributes of a residential neighbourhood charging service would offer an attractive substitute to charging an EV on private property overnight, as is most common among existing EV owners. Our stated choice experiment is designed to reflect preferences for parking as well as charging behaviour in order to ground the choices in trade-offs familiar to a target market representative of car drivers who are unlikely to be able to charge at home. Our findings suggest that this target population has different socio-demographic characteristics from the early adopters of EVs, and that therefore their priorities and preferences are different. Whether on-street or in a car park, the local environment in which the EV charging service sits and the experience of walking home after plugging in the vehicle is of primary importance. Some will also value the certainty of an available space over its convenience.

Users are increasingly acknowledged as important actors fostering those fundamental socio-technical innovations needed to achieve a sustainable society. In the literature, users have so far been portrayed mostly to play a role in early phases of technology formation. However, more recently users have become important players in the upscaling of various innovations. With the advent of new social media, users may interact effortlessly across large distances, exchange knowledge and so increase their contribution to upscaling. We investigate the new potential of virtual user communities. Conceptually, we build on recent insights from socio-technical transition studies to identify different upscaling dimensions. We conduct an internet ethnography of a large virtual community that formed around the Electric Vehicle (EV). Based on these data, we present virtual community characteristics and core mechanisms of participation in upscaling. We find that the community plays an important and distinctive role in fostering electric vehicle use.

A geographical analysis of sustainability transitions allows one to better understand the emergence and upscaling of sustainable innovations. We first theorize about the spatial heterogeneity of regime, niche and landscape within the Multi-Level Perspective and then apply our framework to car-sharing adoption across all Dutch neighbourhoods. We distinguish between business-to-consumer and peer-to-peer car-sharing, which differ in terms of business model and greenhouse gas reducing impacts. For these two innovations, we demonstrate how the relation between niche innovation and the socio-technical regime of private car ownership affects adoption patterns. Our study can be read as a plea for full-fledged geographical analysis of sustainability transitions equally emphasizing the spatial heterogeneity of niche, regime and landscape.

It is one of the central arguments of the Varieties-of-Capitalism (VoC) literature that national institutions determine comparative advantage. While Liberal Market Economies (LMEs) are said to offer comparative institutional advantages to firms that specialize in high-tech sectors based on radical innovation, Coordinated Market Economies (CMEs) offer advantages to firms specializing in medium-high-tech sectors characterized by incremental innovation. Several studies have tested these claims and arrived at contradictory results about specialization in line with institutional advantages. We argue that undifferentiated conceptualizations of the notion of specialization contribute to these inconclusive results. Based on the insights of the innovation literature on comparative advantage, we therefore disentangle the concepts of 1) economic specialization, 2) technological specialization, and 3) innovative specialization. Our analyses of panel data on exports and patents show that the VoC theory is rather weak in explaining patterns of economic specialization but can account for technological specialization. Furthermore, the VoC literature can hardly explain patterns of innovative specialization.