Raimo Lovio

The contribution of local experiments and negotiation processes to field-level learning in emerging (niche) technologies. Meta-analysis of 27 new energy projects in Europe

This article examines how local experiments and negotiation processes contribute to social and field-level learning. The analysis is framed within the niche development literature, which offers a framework for analyzing the relation between projects in local contexts and the transfer of local experiences into generally applicable rules. The authors examine 2 case studies drawn from a meta-analysis of 27 new energy projects. The case studies, both pertaining to biogas projects for local municipalities, illustrate the diversity of applications for a technology through processes of local variation and selection. The authors examine the diversity of expectations and the negotiation and alignment of these expectations underlying the diversity of local solutions. Moreover, the authors address how the transfer of lessons from individual local experiments can follow different pathways and yet always require due attention to the social and cultural limits to the transferability of solutions.

User−Producer Interaction in Housing Energy Innovations

Von Hippel and colleagues have highlighted the crucial role of users in innovation in different industries and types of products. They describe the innovation process in terms of the distinct domains of knowledge that producers and users possess. Producers have knowledge about technical solutions and users about their needs, the context of use, and their own capabilities as users. Both sets of knowledge are characterized by “stickiness”: They move relatively freely within their own domain but are difficult to transfer outside of it. In the case of radical innovations for sustainable consumption, the problem of “sticky information” is compounded. Both producers and consumers need to reach out of their conventional competencies and search for new solutions. “Societal actors,” such as government bodies or environmental experts, can show the way to such solutions, but this new knowledge needs to be integrated with the “sticky” knowledge about everyday practices in production and consumption. In the present article we attempt to conceptualize the role and interaction of user and producer knowledge with the knowledge of environmental experts in housing energy innovations. We do so by applying the user−producer interaction framework to a case study on the introduction of low-energy housing concepts in Finland. On the basis of this analysis, we draw conclusions on the potential and limitations of todays practices in the field. For example, we suggest that user involvement can help to enhance the acceptance of low-energy solutions but that the methods for involving users need to be adapted to the particular circumstances in each industry.

Comparing alternative path creation frameworks in the context of emerging biofuel fields in the Netherlands, Sweden and Finland.

Several studies on innovation have brought forward different conceptions on how innovations and new technological paths are created. Theoretical arguments differ regarding the foundational ontologies and the major factors influencing path formation. The article aims to compare two strands of literature related to new path formation: (1) strategic niche management and the related multi-level perspective and (2) technological innovation systems. The article examines how these models operate in the context of empirical analyses hypothesizing that there may be fewer differences in empirical results than in theoretical argumentation and that new empirical findings can give a good impetus also for theoretical elaborations. Thus, the article compares empirical analyses made in the same context, namely the transport biofuel field. The actual development of biofuel fields in the Netherlands, Sweden and Finland are also compared. Our analysis suggests some areas in which the two theoretical frameworks might be developed to take recent empirical observations and the spatial dimension better into account.