Socio-technical Transitions and Varieties of Capitalism: Green Regional Innovation and Distinctive Market Niches
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Socio-technical Transitions and Varieties of Capitalism: Green Regional Innovation and Distinctive Market Niches Philip Cooke
Received: 8 September 2010 / Accepted: 12 September 2010 / Published online: 2 October 2010 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010
Abstract The aim of this paper is to examine strategic niche management theory applied to green technology industries in a number of different geographical and economic settings. This is aided by a further quest, to establish firm groundwork for a neo-Schumpeterian theory of economic geography based upon his theorisation of the key roles of innovation and entrepreneurship in regional development. These two perspectives fit together rather seamlessly conceptually and in the empirical case material drawn from the USA and Europe. The results point to the centrality of geographical space in the formation not only of paradigms of regime change in industrial organisation but also of more thoroughgoing transitions from one sociotechnical landscape, within which many technological regimes may have been subject to ‘creative destruction’, to another coevolutionary landscape that may be the setting for the next set of, in this case, successive post-hydrocarbon technological regimes. Observation of potential landscape change of the kind in focus in the paper is rare, and the conclusions do not go much beyond the identification of the first key elements from which the grander regime and landscape transitions may be consequent. Keywords Green technology . Technological cycle . Market niche . Transition regions . Innovation systems
Introduction In the system innovation literature, technological cycles expressed as ‘long waves’ are typically analysed as the transition to and emergence of, conservatively speaking, a new technological paradigm or regime, and trajectory as proposed by Dosi [20] and Freeman and Perez [21]. Exemplification of such cycles references radical innovation such as sail-to-steam in shipping, air versus ground mobility and digital P. Cooke (*) Centre for Advanced Studies, Cardiff University, 44-45 Park Place, Cathays Park, Cardiff CF10 3BB, UK e-mail: [email protected]
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J Knowl Econ (2010) 1:239–267
over analogue communication media. This perspective comes under severe scrutiny when it is realised that all these transitions shared dependence on a fundamental hydrocarbon energy input. We are privileged as social scientists and citizens to live at a point in time when the deep, propulsive resource that fuelled every technological paradigm since the onset of the Industrial Age seems itself to be in question. Under the hypothesis that climate change and the so-called peak oil explain the possible future demise of hydrocarbons as main energy providers to economic evolution, we propose to consider the present conjuncture alternatively, and more boldly speaking, as a new post-hydrocarbon ‘socio-technical landscape’ [22, 40]. In the first section of this paper, two approaches to regime theory (urban and technological) will be contrasted and the case made
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