Search

With this commentary, we share our reflections at the end of a five-year interdisciplinary research project (from 2016 to 2020) on cycling innovations in living labs across the Netherlands. The commentary is the product of a collective writing effort of the researchers. It combines reflections on both the content of our research project (cycling through the lens of innovations) from various disciplinary perspectives – including socio-technical transitions, mobilities, urban design, transport planning and history – and reflections on the transdisciplinary approach (living labs) underpinning our research. We hope that our reflections can benefit other researchers concerned with similar topics and approaches. Our research project, Smart Cycling Futures (SCF), began as a proposal within the Smart Urban Regions of the Future (SURF) program, funded by the Dutch Council for Academic Research (NWO). This call of €16.5 million was co-financed by the Dutch Ministries of Infrastructure & Environment and Internal Affairs. As one of the five winning consortia – the other consortia focused on self-driving cars, influencing travel behaviour, demand-oriented public transport, and small-scale experiments – our group of mobility-oriented researchers played an active role in shaping the evolving landscape of smart mobility innovation in the Netherlands.

Most transition studies are historical in nature and fail to arrive at prospective conclusions about future potential. In this paper we develop a new prospective transition framework, which revolves around the interplay between business models and socio-technical contexts. By looking at the dynamics of increasing returns, industry structure and the role of institutions, we analyze the upscaling potential of innovative bike sharing business models as introduced in Dutch cities over the past ten years (two-way station-based, one-way station-based, one-way free floating, and peer-to-peer sharing). We find that station-based business models are well institutionalized but harder to scale up, while the recent one-way free-floating model has the greatest scaling potential if institutional adaptations and geo-fencing technologies are successfully implemented. Peer-to-peer sharing is likely to remain a niche with special purpose bikes.

Firm-level strategies, particularly political strategies, are overlooked in transition studies. Therefore, we study how car manufacturers combine and change their innovation and political influence strategies in response to a technology-forcing regulation that attempts to drive transition. We use Oliver and Holzinger?s (2008) conceptual framework on the case of the zero emission vehicle mandate over the period 1990-2013. We use patent and sales data to operationalize the R&D and commercialization aspects of innovation strategies, while using corporate political activities data to operationalize political influence strategies. We find that firstly, car manufacturers use specific combinations of innovation and political influence strategies, along their value maintaining or creating nature. Secondly, these manufacturers change their strategies and become more value creating over time, which supports socio-technical transition processes. Thirdly, we refine Oliver and Holzinger?s (2008) strategy typology by identifying subclasses in defensive (opposition and slowdown) and proactive strategies (shaping, support and progressive).

This special issue reports some results presented at the 5th International Sustainability Transitions (IST) conference, which took place in Utrecht, The Netherlands. The guiding theme of the conference was “Impact and Institutions”. With regard to “Impact”, various sessions devoted attention to the practical applicability of transitions research and addressed the question: Do the insights, theoretical models and new theory development sufficiently spill over to the policy and business domains? The focus on institutions reflected the observation that while the first years the community was busy establishing its identity and developing relevant new theoretical frameworks, the more established community is linking up with other areas of research. Whereas the majority of papers at previous conferences can be characterized as empirical applications of the main frameworks (SNM, MLP, TIS), now we observe a broadening where researchers strengthen the theoretical foundations of these frameworks by connecting the sustainability transitions literature to other relevant bodies of literature. Especially the link between transition and institutional theories is seen as a fruitful avenue for further research.

Our climate is changing. Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) has been identified as an important technology to reduce CO2 emissions in order to avoid dangerous climate change. The implementation of CCS is however slow and CCS is publicly contested. This thesis focuses on the debate on this technology. In fact CCS is not just one technology, but a set of several hundred different CCS chains, having their own advantages and drawbacks. Some consider CCS therefore as a multi tool that can be used in all kind of different applications. For opponents it resembles more a multi-headed dragon, since each time one chain is eliminated, a new configuration arises. This thesis examines how CCS is perceived by the general public, politicians and scientists and unravels the underlying considerations on which their opinions are based.

To protect their vested interests, incumbent firms have a history of opposing change, even when change is societally beneficial. Empirical research on this topic is limited. In this dissertation we study the role of incumbent firms in the socio-technical transition to a more sustainable society. The development and commercialization of new, cleaner technologies are important for such a transition. But these technologies render obsolete many existing assets and competences that are specific to the established technology, which decreases the competitive advantage of incumbents. Incumbents that thrive on the established technology therefore have incentive to prevent the introduction of such new, cleaner technologies. The role of incumbent firms in sustainability transitions is studied by looking at how they facilitate transition through innovation, and how they influence transition through political influence strategies. The focus is on the automotive industry. Firstly, we studied the relation between competitive forces, that stimulate incumbents to innovate, and the continuation of waves of Clean Vehicle Technology (CVT) development. The findings suggest that competitive forces positively relate to continued CVT development. Because of competitive pressures, we expect the current wave of electric vehicle (EV) development not to collapse like previous waves of CVT development, but to be prolonged on the longer term. Secondly, we quantitatively studied what types of incumbents pioneer radical innovation, by linking their incentive and opportunity to innovate to EV sales over the period 1990-2011. It turns out that during the period that EVs were commercialized (i.e. 2007-2011), large car manufacturers with both a strong incentive and a strong opportunity to innovate sold significantly more EVs. Hence, car manufacturers that profited relatively little from the established technology and that had developed an EV asset position, were the ones to abandon the established technology first by engaging in radical innovation. Thirdly, we studied the innovation and political influence strategies incumbents used in response to public CVT policy. The case study focused on incumbent car manufacturers’ response to the Californian zero emission vehicle mandate over the period 2000–2013. We developed a new theoretical framework on corporate response strategies to public policy with which we integrate the innovation and political activities literature. Combining patent, sales and content analysis, the research shows that car manufacturers initially showed few innovation activities, but over time strongly increased their efforts. Their political influence strategies changed from opposing the mandate to trying to shape and/or support it. However, coalitions continued to oppose the mandate, as they were assigned to do the manufacturers’ “dirty work”. We showed that car manufacturers combine their innovation and political influence strategies in synergistic ways. The case study thus illustrates that the role of incumbent car manufacturers over time changed from hampering socio-technical transition to a more sustainable society, to facilitating it. To deal with industry opposition to policy interventions, our research suggests that policy makers focus their interaction with industry on individual firms instead of coalitions, craft policies that stimulate competition between firms to break apart their closed industry front, and complement technology-forcing policies with demand-pull initiatives.

Sustainability issues in the agro-food sector have become increasingly important, and in order to deal with these sustainability issues, innovations are deemed necessary. Only introducing new technologies is not enough, system innovations are needed in which changes in the whole socio-technical system are required. However, because the Dutch agro-food system is very complex and involves a great diversity of actors, varying from farmers to processing businesses, and from societal organizations to farmers’ associations, innovation is not very simple. These actors have different backgrounds, goals, ideas and stakes, which make the interaction between them sometimes difficult. The phenomenon highlighted in this thesis is that different actors have their own way of framing issues related to the challenges of sustainability. Framing is the phenomenon that actors are limited in the way they think and act due to underlying cognitive structures, interactional patterns and/or material characteristics. In particular, umbrella terms such as ‘sustainability’, involving different meanings, can be expected to be framed in different ways by various actors. In this research we suggest a typology of framing based on three different levels of social dynamics, on which frames reside and operate in distinct ways, namely the level of the global discourse (societal discourses), localized collective (project level) and face-to-face interaction (between individuals). Furthermore we make a distinction between cognitive frames that are relatively static structures in one’s mind that enable and constrain understanding, action and interaction; interactional frames that are the fluid frames that condition interaction; and material frames that are the characteristics of artefacts that enable and constrain understanding, action and interaction. In topic biographies we followed framing of topics over time, and we typically see differences in framing, struggles about problems and solutions, and alignment of frames in various forms and degrees. We can make a distinction between internal and external aspects influencing the framing in a project. The cases show that the sense of urgency among the actors can be influential in determining whether a collective solution should be found or not. Alignment may lead to different situations: multiple frames can exist beside each other; frames complement each other and that actors combine ideas in a ‘distributed’ frame; or actors have the same frame, namely a ‘collective’ frame. Typically, innovation processes become difficult when they run into limits of existing ideas and developments. This research shows why problems can be difficult to tackle; especially in the case of transitions that entail complex changes and involve many actors, and where solutions are not straightforward. Often, local visions and strategies are coupled to more general ideas and discourses. We demonstrated that a creative solution can reconcile diverse frames and thereby help to realize a system innovation. Heterogeneous actors will have different frames, and should deal with these differences in order to get a project up and running. The practical lesson is, then, that it helps when actors are aware of their own frames and the frames of others and make them explicit.