Kaisa Johanna Matschoss

Exploring emerging customer needs for smart grid applications

Customer needs considering new smart grid technologies do not pre-exist but emerge in the markets. This paper identifies and engages lead users in service development based on possibilities created by smart grids. We explore how small-scale customers can become active players in electricity markets and create benefit through smart grid applications. Our paper presents an empirical model for identifying lead users in smart grid applications. We present first results from lead user focus groups and our preliminary conclusions highlight opportunities for developing successful service offerings based on smart grid applications.

Governance experiments in climate action – empirical findings from the 28 European Union countries

ABSTRACT Climate targets call for novel policy measures to facilitate widespread adoption of low-carbon solutions and innovations. The literature on socio-technical systems argues that experimentation has a prominent role in enabling sustainability transition. Experiments represent ways of testing new ideas and methods across a wide range of policy fields. Governance experiments in particular can support accelerated diffusion of new solutions, because they integrate policy with innovations. Here, types of success factors in the implementation of governance experiments to mitigate climate change are examined. Statistical analysis of sustainability innovations in the 28 European Union countries indicates that the types of success factors in governance experiments differ from those of product and social experiments. Governance experimentation is more positioned within socio-technical regimes than in strategic niches. These results suggest that governance experiments may indeed provide new transition opportunities towards low-carbon societies.

Innovation intermediary challenging the energy incumbent: enactment of local socio-technical transition pathways by destabilisation of regime rules

ABSTRACT The energy sector needs to transform towards sustainability. The multi-level perspective on sociotechnical transitions is embracing an enactment perspective, which focuses on the agency of various actors in shifting transitions pathways but has yet to study local urban experiments from such an enactment perspective. Our empirical research examines an innovation intermediary’s work in destabilising the regime rules in relation to the local energy incumbent company in Helsinki, Finland. Our paper seeks answers to the questions: How does the collaboration of the intermediary and the local energy company unfold? What are the impacts of the intermediary work on the local energy company in terms of enactment of transition pathways and what are the mechanisms causing the impact? Our research shows that the intermediary contributes to the transition by disturbing existing rules, structures, practices and networks by convening innovation champions from different constituencies, renegotiating regime rules and disrupting existing R&D alliances.

Sustainable Futures: Comparing Methodologies for Analyzing Citizen Visions in Europe

There are increasing calls for engaging citizens in the development of future outlooks. At the same time, large‐scale public engagement activities warrant appropriate methods for analyzing their outcomes. This paper reviews how topic modeling could provide such a methodology, which both accounts for all textual data collected in public engagement activities, however large in scope, yet also allows for meaningful topical analysis. It compares topic modeling results concerning a corpus of 179 citizen visions from 30 European countries on desirable and sustainable futures to those acquired through deliberative analysis. While both methodologies contend that European citizens’ outlook consists of education, sustainability in the economy, health concerns, and fairness in communities, and the particular strengths of topic modeling relate to its documentability, repeatability, cost efficiency, and scalability. Topic modeling can also be considered to support public engagement analytically from the perspective of knowledge formation rather than that of common sense.