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

42 Chapter 2
2.4 Integrating insights from various scholars
Drawing on the ideas of sociotechnical change theory innovation is
conceptualised in this thesis as a process of co-evolution of technological
and societal change, or in other words technology is socially shaped.
Innovation is an interactive process and not a straightforward linear process
where new ideas, principles or knowledge that emerge from the fundamental
research community bring about innovations in the applied research
community which are tested before its introduction and potential further
diffusion into the market. It “is not a process where actors (academia,
laboratories, firms, users) intervene sequentially, but one during which
durable links are created between these various players” (De Laat, 1996:
34). Drawing from evolutionary economics, instead of focussing almost
solely on artefacts, and the technical and economic problems and solutions
related to them in the innovation process, the focus here is strongly on actors
and the way their behaviour, perceptions, beliefs, and expectations are
originating from previous experiences, accumulated knowledge and
competencies, and from the routines they have developed.
This implies that present and future choices are conditioned by choices made
in the past, which produces a dominant pattern of innovation of relatively
predictable, incremental improvements by established networks and
technologies that co-evolve along established trajectories (Kash and Rycroft,
2000: 822). This ‘normal’ pattern of innovation does not challenge the way
technology is embedded in society and the ‘rule set’ implicit in the way it is
configured. A fundamental starting point is thus that technology does not
function independently, but that, in order to work, technology is part of a
larger configuration that consists of mutually attuned elements such as
infrastructure, knowledge, skills, industrial organisation, regulatory
standards and cultural norms, through which the technology can be handled
productively. Thus, in a large technical system such as the electricity system,
organisations such as electrical equipment producers, utilities, and
investment banks are aligned to components such as scientific books and
articles, and education and research at universities, and to regulatory
standards (Hughes, 1987: 51). The functioning of technologies involves
linkages between heterogeneous elements (Geels, 2002a). The activities and
interaction processes of actors are embedded in ensembles of social and
technical components that make up a technological system, and are guided
and constrained by rules and principles underlying the system. Rip and
Kemp (1998: 340) use the term technological regime for this set of rules and
define it as “the rule set or grammar embedded in a complex of engineering
practices, production process technologies, product characteristics, skills
and procedures, ways of handling relevant artefacts and persons, ways of