Innovation and institutional change: the transition to a sustainable ...

30 Chapter 2
- Misadaptation between organisational routines can increase and, (1)
their problem solving efficacy, and/or (2) and their ability to represent
mechanisms of organisational governance and social control.
- New organisational forms that originally develop in other contexts can
invade into the system.
Cowan and Hulten (1996) argue that overcoming existing lock-in (to the
internal combustion engine of the car in their case study) requires
extraordinary events such as:
- a crisis in the technology involved;
- regulation;
- technological breakthrough;
- changes in taste;
- niche markets;
- scientific results.
Kash and Rycroft (2000: 826-828) argue that shifts in the patterns of the
innovation of complex technologies occur through:
- technical community disintegration: this refers to the loss of consensus
concerning what comes next, replacing the consensus (common
knowledge, established search heuristics and routines) regarding the next
series of incremental innovation;
- invaders: networks or organisations entering innovation processes and
becoming new competitors based on different knowledge and
capabilities that allow them to breach the boundaries of the established
trajectory, or based on different organisational forms, such as lean
production by Toyota.
- new technology waves: technologies become available with distinctly
different and better performance across a wide range of sectors, such as
digital electronics;
- external change: this refers to changes in markets (e.g. market
saturation), changes in public policy, and changes of a social nature such
as increasing pressure from societal groups with regard to environmental
or consumer risks.
Unruh (2002) separately focuses on two potential sources for escaping
carbon lock-in, (1) technological, and (2) social/institutional, but adds that
the process of escape should not be seen as the result of a single change, but
rather a series of complex, interconnected changes in multiple variables.
Berkhout et al. (2002: 15) link the nature of transitions that may unfold to
the vulnerability of a regime to selection pressure. “We may posit the
existence of actors having either highly asymmetric or more balanced sets of
competences and resources (the greater the imbalance, the less vulnerable is
the regime). Likewise we could characterise networks as being either tight,