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Ruling out innovations - Technology regimes, rules and failures: The cases of heat pump power generation and bio-gas production in The Netherlands
Rob Raven
Department of Technology Management, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands
Geert Verbong
Department of Technology Management, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands
Abstract
Technological regimes are a common concept in innovation literature. We elaborate the concept of technological regimes in terms of rules. Rules tell actors how to behave, while at the same time their behaviour is a source for rules creation. We distinguish different types of rules for different actor groups. These rules can be embedded in both variation and selection environment and they can be hierarchal.
Our hypothesis is that rules will generally guide actors into historically grown paths and directions. They tend to favour the incumbent technology over radical innovations. Our two case studies, power generation from heat pumps and bio-gas production from manure, seem to confirm this hypothesis. Both, potentially radical, innovations failed in the Netherlands, while they succeeded elsewhere. The heat pump case clearly endorses our hypothesis that rules from the incumbent regime do guide the development of innovations into specific directions. In the manure digestion case, changing rules from the selection environment directly interacted with the variation environment. Also, the innovation process occurred within the context of multiple regimes.
Overall, the notion of rules seems a promising approach to explain success or failure of radical innovations, but a more extended elaboration of the relative importance of different rules is still needed.
Keywords
technological regimes, rules, actors, radical innovations, heat pumps, biogas, new product uptake; case studies
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