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

46 Chapter 2
composition of the network and the direction of their activities will reflect
the existing knowledge base and the established technology design and will
foster consensus about the problems that need to be tackled and the way they
should be solved. In the words of Bijker and Law (1992:10): “technologies
are stabilized because the network of social relations in which they are
involved – together with the various strategies that drive and give shape to
the network – reach some kind of accommodation”. In the normal pattern of
incremental innovation, network learning involves searching for knowledge
close to previous learning activities and is mostly internal to the network,
defined as local learning by Kash and Rycroft (2000: 823). “With each
incremental advance, local learning tends to become more focused and more
dependent upon what has done before…Time pressures reinforce the path
dependence of local learning…Often these time pressures lead to local
learning that reject large quantities of knowledge. In our case studies
success in incremental innovation was directly related to the capacity to only
use the knowledge needed to solve the immediate problem” (Rycroft and
Kash, 2002: 26-27). In their analysis of six cases of complex technologies 9
Kash and Rycroft (2000, 2002) find that while patterns of incremental
innovations take place in stable network along an established design,
innovations of a more radical kind (either transitional other transformational
in their terminology) require major modification or renewal of networks.
At the sector level, increasing adoption of particular technologies or products
feeds processes of standardisation to facilitate compatibility between various
components (technological interrelatedness), and to facilitate the large group
of users accustomed to the product (network externalities). Co-evolution of
industrial organisation and established design reflects the way linkages
between production, distribution, use and infrastructure are organised along
the dominant design of the technological system (e.g. large central electricity
producers focussing on supply factors in the era of monopolistic organisation
with captive consumers and very limited customer communication and
marketing). The formation of standards based on what is state of the art
‘within’ the sector can generate ‘capture’ of regulatory system and lead to
barriers to innovation.
At the level of society, technologies/products become embedded in every
day life in the sense that routines of other actors become aligned to that of
the established design. Thus, when people buy a house it is routinely
expected that electricity wires and sockets run through the house and are
appropriately connected to the grid. The question how electricity generation
is taken care for and the possible choice for alternatives (such as generation
9 I.e. turbine blades, cardio-imaging technology, audio compact discs, radiation therapy
technology, micro-floppy disks, and microprocessors.