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

Theoretical perspectives 43
defining problems – all of them embedded in institutions and
infrastructures”.
As a regime emerges and evolves, the different elements become strongly
interwoven such as that the mental frames of actors will view the existing
technological system as the natural way things work. As they fall outside
their frame of reference alternatives will be intuitively rejected because the
focus tends to be on problems and limitations associated with them as they
are assessed on their fit with the existing technological regime. And clearly
in the early stages of the development of a new technology a lot of
imperfections can be pointed out. Therefore, there is a need for the inclusion
of alternative frames of references into evaluation mechanisms to appreciate
technological options that deviate from the incremental path, such as for
example a focus on achievements and potential of new technologies. For
this, however, cognitive barriers need to be broken down, such as those
established by the fact that members of technological communities have
undergone “a long process of learning and socialization that produces
deeply held assumptions about technology” (Lampel, 2001: 307). They are
often strongly rooted into existing regimes, cognitively, professionally, or
even economically, and tend to develop evaluation routines that filter out
information not consistent with their beliefs about technology. “Data
inconsistent with an individual’s evaluation routines are either ignored or
appear as noise. Data consistent with evaluation routines are perceived as
information and cognitively rearranged in a manner that reinforces an
individual’s beliefs. Given bounds to rationality, this bracketing of
perception occurs because individuals may be more interested in confirming
their beliefs than in actively trying to disprove them” (Garud and Rappa,
1994: 347).
This is but one example on the cognitive dimension of a regime that
illustrates the difficulty of deviating from the technological path rooted in
the regime. If we look at entrepreneurs, these continuously influence paths
by setting processes in motion by putting new products on the market and by
employing new technologies. This, however, predominantly involves
innovative activities that incrementally built upon the regime in terms of
artefacts, knowledge, infrastructure and technologies. Incumbent firms tend
to develop incremental innovations based on their established organisational
and technical capabilities, and on present ways of evaluation, within their
existing networks and markets. The main point of these examples is that
innovation is “not a negation of the past, but an elaboration and extension in
specific directions depending on the particular sequence of unfolding
events” (Garud and Karnoe, 2001: 1). This concept of path dependence is
useful to explain how at different levels lock-in to certain trajectories of
change, organisational structures, or modes of governance occurs.