Designing low carbon innovation organisations: the Energy Technologies Institute experience

Abstract

Abstract If clean energy innovation is to be accelerated at the pace required, new approaches to designing public innovation organisations need to be developed. Despite the importance of these organisations in driving sustainability transitions, their role has not yet been explored in the literature. This paper addresses this gap by refining ten principles for publicly funded innovation organisation design and applying them to a detailed case study of the Energy Technologies Institute (ETI), UK. Results demonstrate that the ETI s design reflected broader political and industrial relationships at the time of its formation, embedding six large, incumbent energy firms. This effected its ability to pursue the riskier aspects of its mission, resulting in the pursuit of more incremental technologies and outputs. Generalisable aspects of effective innovation organisation design and opportunities to further develop the principles are also identified.