The corona (COVID-19) pandemic is not a 'game changer' as such, but it is a crisis that o... more The corona (COVID-19) pandemic is not a 'game changer' as such, but it is a crisis that offers opportunities for dealing with three interrelated crises: the ecological crisis (climate change, loss of biodiversity), the rise of populistic leaders, and the inequality crisis (the widening of the gap between rich and poor). Our argument is that sustainability transitions will not succeed without a different economy and another social contract: a different alliance between citizen, society, economy and government, with the associated rights and duties of care (for the environment and the well-being of others, including future generations). A different social contract is not only desirable from the point of view of sustainability and fairness, justice and equality, but is also necessary to restore citizens' trust in politics, government, companies and each other. Drawing on evolutionary governance theory, which says that governance is poly-centric and path-dependent, and insig...
Solutions to the grand societal challenges faced by the knowledge society of the early 21st centu... more Solutions to the grand societal challenges faced by the knowledge society of the early 21st century will necessarily involve systemic change. This in turn implies a need to understand the ways in which social innovation can be ultimately transformative (creating the conditions for systemic change). This paper addresses the question “how can social innovation be analysed in relation to systemic change and grand societal challenges?” Social innovation is re-conceptualised in relation to systemic change, drawing upon a transitions perspective and emphasizing the important roles of: empowerment, transformative discourses and game-changing developments. This provides a broad conceptual framework, suitable for critically evaluating the hypothesis that social innovation is able to bring about new forms of social interaction that empower people to undertake strategies and actions which, under certain conditions, lead to transformative, systemic change. We propose a methodology for the devel...
The paper looks at patterns in eco-innovation and f ctors behind this. Special attention is given... more The paper looks at patterns in eco-innovation and f ctors behind this. Special attention is given to t he role of public policy. The paper examines the shift towards cleaner products and continuing importance of end-of-pipe solutions, national difference s in eco-innovation use, issues of science push and market pull, lead market issues, and the growing at tention to system innovation.
Integrierte Produktpolitik bietet einen Rahmen für die Verbesserung der Umweltleistung von Produk... more Integrierte Produktpolitik bietet einen Rahmen für die Verbesserung der Umweltleistung von Produkten. Sie ist geeignet, schrittweise Verbesserungsinnovationen bei Produkten zu fördern. Doch läuft sie Gefahr, sich zu sehr auf bestehende Produktsysteme zu konzentrieren und hierdurch die für weit reichendere Umweltentlastungen erforderlichen Systeminnovationen zu vernachlässigen. Deshalb muss sie um weitere Politikansätze, wie etwa "transition management", ergänzt werden.
There is much talk about environmental policies being faulty. Past policies are being criticised ... more There is much talk about environmental policies being faulty. Past policies are being criticised for failing to achieve environmental goals (the environmentalist complaint), for being overly expensive (the industrialist complaint) and for failing to encourage innovation and dynamic efficiency (the complaint of economists dealing with innovation). This paper looks at the innovation and technology adoption effects of past environmental policies. It finds indeed few examples of environmental policies that stimulated innovation. The common technology response is the use of expensive end-of-pipe solutions and incremental process changes offering limited environmental gains. This begs the question: why did the policies fail to promote more radical innovation and dynamic efficiency? One explanation-well-recognised in the economic literature-is the capture of government policies by special interests. This paper offers a second explanation-based on innovation and technology adoption studieswhich says that in order to have a decisive and socially beneficial influence policy instruments must be fine-tuned to the circumstances in which sociotechnical change processes occur and tip the balance. Within this alternative view, the starting point of government interventions is the capabilities, interests, interdependencies and games of social actors around an environmental problem instead of the set of environmental policy instruments for achieving an environmental goal. The paper sees a need for government authorities to be explicitly concerned with technical change (rather than implicitly through a change in the economic frame conditions) and to be concerned with institutional arrangements beyond the choice of policy instruments, and act as a change agent. This requires different roles for policy makers: that of a sponsor, planner, regulator, matchmaker, alignment actor and 'creative game regulator'. The paper offers two perspectives on environmental policy: an instrument one and a modulation one. The latter is especially important for promoting innovation and bringing about radical change, something which is very difficult with traditional regulatory instruments. Instruments for promoting environment-enhancing technical change are appraised and suggestions are offered for the purposes for which different policy instruments may be used in differing economic contexts.
This article empirically applies, tests, and refines a conceptual framework that articulates thre... more This article empirically applies, tests, and refines a conceptual framework that articulates three dimensions of transformative impact and transformative capacity: depth, width, and length. This responds to the need for a more precise conceptual language to describe these terms and operationalize them in a way that is useful for practitioners in social innovation networks. By applying this framework in diverse cases of social innovation networks, we demonstrate how the framework can serve to identify and assess transformative impacts and the capacities needed to bring about these impacts. Our findings include 1. empirical substantiations, 2. refinements, and 3. interaction effects among the elements of the framework. We also subjected the framework to an appraisal by practitioners in social innovation networks regarding the recognizability of the framework elements and usefulness for practice. The framework was generally perceived as very meaningful and valuable for social innovatio...
This paper discusses the need for societal innovation as a systemic form of innovation for sustai... more This paper discusses the need for societal innovation as a systemic form of innovation for sustainable development. Sustainable development requires collective action from stakeholders in the form of system building activities, which in its turn requires societal innovation. Through societal innovation, based on multiple value creation, external costs are being prevented or reduced because of innovation-oriented explorations within a wider frame (a societal improvement perspective), ascertained by the actors. This requires design thinking and proper distribution of the costs and benefits, accepted by the participants. With this paper, we hope to advance the research agenda on societal innovation based on multi-actor improvement processes and associated intentional logics, as topics that are weakly theorized in the business literature on sustainable development and the sustainability transition literature. We are critical of triple helix models and models emphasizing shared value cre...
European Public & Social Innovation Review, 2017
This paper argues that there is currently a need for new theory on transformative social innovati... more This paper argues that there is currently a need for new theory on transformative social innovation that is able to provide empowering insights to practice, especially in terms of how social innovation interacts with transformative change processes. It identifies three 'pitfalls' that such theorybuilding needs to confront, and presents middle-range theory development, together with a focus on social relations and the processes of social innovation, as three elements of a theory-building strategy that responds to these pitfalls. In describing the implementation of this strategy in successive iterations between empirical case study research and theoretical integration, critical reflections are drawn. Taken together, these reflections underline the importance of maintaining a reflexive approach in developing a new theory of transformative social innovation.
His research work and publications range from history of technology, science and technology studi... more His research work and publications range from history of technology, science and technology studies, innovation and diffusion theory to constructive technology assessment, environmental management and policy studies. Experimenting for sustainable transport viii RTD Programme 'Environment and Climate', and we wish to express our gratitude for the support. The starting point of this project was the observed under-utilization of available transport technologies that might contribute to sustainable development. We focused on sixteen case studies of actual experiments. The project involved a team of excellent researchers. We would like to thank
This article responds to increasing public and academic discourses on social innovation, which of... more This article responds to increasing public and academic discourses on social innovation, which often rest on the assumption that social innovation can drive societal change and empower actors to deal with societal challenges and a retreating welfare state. In order to scrutinise this assumption, this article proposes a set of concepts to study the dynamics of transformative social innovation and underlying processes of multi-actor (dis)empowerment. First, the concept of transformative social innovation is unpacked by proposing four foundational concepts to help distinguish between different pertinent 'shades' of change and innovation: 1) social innovation, (2) system innovation, (3) game-changers, and (4) narratives of change. These concepts, invoking insights from transitions studies and social innovations literature, are used to construct a conceptual account of how transformative social innovation emerges as a co-evolutionary interaction between diverse shades of change and innovation. Second, the paper critically discusses the dialectic nature of multi-actor (dis)empowerment that underlies such processes of change and innovation. The paper then demonstrates how the conceptualisations are applied to three empirical case-studies of transformative social innovation: Impact Hub, Time Banks and Credit Unions. In the conclusion we synthesise how the concepts and the empirical examples help to understand contemporary shifts in societal power relations and the changing role of the welfare state.
This paper assesses the role of urban experiments for local planning processes through a case-bas... more This paper assesses the role of urban experiments for local planning processes through a case-based analysis of the city lab of Maastricht. In conjunction with this, the article offers three contributions, as additional elements. Firstly, the paper develops a set of defining characteristics of city labs as an analytical concept which is relevant for discussions about (collaborative) planning. Secondly, it refines the literature on collaborative planning by drawing attention to experimentation and innovation. Thirdly, the paper assesses the potential of city labs to contribute to the innovation of urban governance. The work draws from the literature on experimentation and learning as well as the literature on collaborative urban planning. In the conclusions, we discuss the potential of city labs as vehicles for learning about new urban planning approaches and their limitations as spaces for small-scale experimentation. The paper is based on research for the URB@Exp research project f...
This paper was prepared for an OECD Workshop on the Benefits of Climate Policy: Improving Informa... more This paper was prepared for an OECD Workshop on the Benefits of Climate Policy: Improving Information for Policy Makers, held 12-13 December 2002. The aim of the Workshop and the underlying Project is to outline a conceptual framework to estimate the benefits of climate change policies, and to help organise information on this topic for policy makers. The Workshop covered both adaptation and mitigation policies, and related to different spatial and temporal scales for decision-making. However, particular emphasis was placed on understanding global benefits at different levels of mitigation-in other words, on the incremental benefit of going from one level of climate change to another. Participants were also asked to identify gaps in existing information and to recommend areas for improvement, including topics requiring further policy-related research and testing. The Workshop brought representatives from governments together with researchers from a range of disciplines to address these issues. Further background on the workshop, its agenda and participants, can be found on the internet at: www.oecd.org/env/cc The overall Project is overseen by the OECD Working Party on Global and Structural Policy (Environment Policy Committee). The Secretariat would like to thank the governments of Canada, Germany and the United States for providing extra-budgetary financial support for the work. This paper is issued as an authored "working paper"-one of a series emerging from the Project. The ideas expressed in the paper are those of the author alone and do not necessarily represent the views of the OECD or its Member Countries. As a working paper, this document has received only limited peer review. Some authors will be further refining their papers, either to eventually appear in the peer-reviewed academic literature, or to become part of a forthcoming OECD publication on this Project. The objective of placing these papers on the internet at this stage is to widely disseminate the ideas contained in them, with a view toward facilitating the review process.
Innovation and sustainable development are broad, general concepts with positive connotations whi... more Innovation and sustainable development are broad, general concepts with positive connotations which are widely used in the social sciences, but usually in an ambiguous, imprecise way. This paper examines various definitions and meanings of sustainability as a preliminary step in analysing sustainable technologies. The term “sustainable technologies” is actually incorrect since sustainable development is not a question of technology or organisation regarding the sustainability of firms but rather a systemic matter. It is wrong to consider certain technologies as sustainable because it is physically impossible for a technology to have no impact at all on the environment: all production and consumption actions have environmental impacts. “Innovation for sustainable development” is a complex idea, due to the opposing requirements (for support and control) that it entails. Innovation policy must take a systemic outlook regarding innovation that combines benefits for users and for society...
Most developed countries have innovation policies for green innovation. This paper examines the r... more Most developed countries have innovation policies for green innovation. This paper examines the rationale for such policies, offers a typology of eco-innovation and develops ten themes for ecoinnovation policy, which are: 1) the need for policy to be based on identified barriers, 2) preventing windfall profits, 3) specific versus generic support policies, 4) balance between policy measures and timing, 5) targeted spending in areas where innovation is needed, 6) missions, 7) strategic intelligence for innovation, 8) portfolios, 9) policy learning and 10) policy coordination and public-private interactions. Relevant cases are discussed and empirical information is provided. It is proposed that the ten themes serve as a framework for eco-innovation policy-making and policy evaluation.
The corona (COVID-19) pandemic is not a 'game changer' as such, but it is a crisis that o... more The corona (COVID-19) pandemic is not a 'game changer' as such, but it is a crisis that offers opportunities for dealing with three interrelated crises: the ecological crisis (climate change, loss of biodiversity), the rise of populistic leaders, and the inequality crisis (the widening of the gap between rich and poor). Our argument is that sustainability transitions will not succeed without a different economy and another social contract: a different alliance between citizen, society, economy and government, with the associated rights and duties of care (for the environment and the well-being of others, including future generations). A different social contract is not only desirable from the point of view of sustainability and fairness, justice and equality, but is also necessary to restore citizens' trust in politics, government, companies and each other. Drawing on evolutionary governance theory, which says that governance is poly-centric and path-dependent, and insig...
Solutions to the grand societal challenges faced by the knowledge society of the early 21st centu... more Solutions to the grand societal challenges faced by the knowledge society of the early 21st century will necessarily involve systemic change. This in turn implies a need to understand the ways in which social innovation can be ultimately transformative (creating the conditions for systemic change). This paper addresses the question “how can social innovation be analysed in relation to systemic change and grand societal challenges?” Social innovation is re-conceptualised in relation to systemic change, drawing upon a transitions perspective and emphasizing the important roles of: empowerment, transformative discourses and game-changing developments. This provides a broad conceptual framework, suitable for critically evaluating the hypothesis that social innovation is able to bring about new forms of social interaction that empower people to undertake strategies and actions which, under certain conditions, lead to transformative, systemic change. We propose a methodology for the devel...
The paper looks at patterns in eco-innovation and f ctors behind this. Special attention is given... more The paper looks at patterns in eco-innovation and f ctors behind this. Special attention is given to t he role of public policy. The paper examines the shift towards cleaner products and continuing importance of end-of-pipe solutions, national difference s in eco-innovation use, issues of science push and market pull, lead market issues, and the growing at tention to system innovation.
Integrierte Produktpolitik bietet einen Rahmen für die Verbesserung der Umweltleistung von Produk... more Integrierte Produktpolitik bietet einen Rahmen für die Verbesserung der Umweltleistung von Produkten. Sie ist geeignet, schrittweise Verbesserungsinnovationen bei Produkten zu fördern. Doch läuft sie Gefahr, sich zu sehr auf bestehende Produktsysteme zu konzentrieren und hierdurch die für weit reichendere Umweltentlastungen erforderlichen Systeminnovationen zu vernachlässigen. Deshalb muss sie um weitere Politikansätze, wie etwa "transition management", ergänzt werden.
There is much talk about environmental policies being faulty. Past policies are being criticised ... more There is much talk about environmental policies being faulty. Past policies are being criticised for failing to achieve environmental goals (the environmentalist complaint), for being overly expensive (the industrialist complaint) and for failing to encourage innovation and dynamic efficiency (the complaint of economists dealing with innovation). This paper looks at the innovation and technology adoption effects of past environmental policies. It finds indeed few examples of environmental policies that stimulated innovation. The common technology response is the use of expensive end-of-pipe solutions and incremental process changes offering limited environmental gains. This begs the question: why did the policies fail to promote more radical innovation and dynamic efficiency? One explanation-well-recognised in the economic literature-is the capture of government policies by special interests. This paper offers a second explanation-based on innovation and technology adoption studieswhich says that in order to have a decisive and socially beneficial influence policy instruments must be fine-tuned to the circumstances in which sociotechnical change processes occur and tip the balance. Within this alternative view, the starting point of government interventions is the capabilities, interests, interdependencies and games of social actors around an environmental problem instead of the set of environmental policy instruments for achieving an environmental goal. The paper sees a need for government authorities to be explicitly concerned with technical change (rather than implicitly through a change in the economic frame conditions) and to be concerned with institutional arrangements beyond the choice of policy instruments, and act as a change agent. This requires different roles for policy makers: that of a sponsor, planner, regulator, matchmaker, alignment actor and 'creative game regulator'. The paper offers two perspectives on environmental policy: an instrument one and a modulation one. The latter is especially important for promoting innovation and bringing about radical change, something which is very difficult with traditional regulatory instruments. Instruments for promoting environment-enhancing technical change are appraised and suggestions are offered for the purposes for which different policy instruments may be used in differing economic contexts.
This article empirically applies, tests, and refines a conceptual framework that articulates thre... more This article empirically applies, tests, and refines a conceptual framework that articulates three dimensions of transformative impact and transformative capacity: depth, width, and length. This responds to the need for a more precise conceptual language to describe these terms and operationalize them in a way that is useful for practitioners in social innovation networks. By applying this framework in diverse cases of social innovation networks, we demonstrate how the framework can serve to identify and assess transformative impacts and the capacities needed to bring about these impacts. Our findings include 1. empirical substantiations, 2. refinements, and 3. interaction effects among the elements of the framework. We also subjected the framework to an appraisal by practitioners in social innovation networks regarding the recognizability of the framework elements and usefulness for practice. The framework was generally perceived as very meaningful and valuable for social innovatio...
This paper discusses the need for societal innovation as a systemic form of innovation for sustai... more This paper discusses the need for societal innovation as a systemic form of innovation for sustainable development. Sustainable development requires collective action from stakeholders in the form of system building activities, which in its turn requires societal innovation. Through societal innovation, based on multiple value creation, external costs are being prevented or reduced because of innovation-oriented explorations within a wider frame (a societal improvement perspective), ascertained by the actors. This requires design thinking and proper distribution of the costs and benefits, accepted by the participants. With this paper, we hope to advance the research agenda on societal innovation based on multi-actor improvement processes and associated intentional logics, as topics that are weakly theorized in the business literature on sustainable development and the sustainability transition literature. We are critical of triple helix models and models emphasizing shared value cre...
European Public & Social Innovation Review, 2017
This paper argues that there is currently a need for new theory on transformative social innovati... more This paper argues that there is currently a need for new theory on transformative social innovation that is able to provide empowering insights to practice, especially in terms of how social innovation interacts with transformative change processes. It identifies three 'pitfalls' that such theorybuilding needs to confront, and presents middle-range theory development, together with a focus on social relations and the processes of social innovation, as three elements of a theory-building strategy that responds to these pitfalls. In describing the implementation of this strategy in successive iterations between empirical case study research and theoretical integration, critical reflections are drawn. Taken together, these reflections underline the importance of maintaining a reflexive approach in developing a new theory of transformative social innovation.
His research work and publications range from history of technology, science and technology studi... more His research work and publications range from history of technology, science and technology studies, innovation and diffusion theory to constructive technology assessment, environmental management and policy studies. Experimenting for sustainable transport viii RTD Programme 'Environment and Climate', and we wish to express our gratitude for the support. The starting point of this project was the observed under-utilization of available transport technologies that might contribute to sustainable development. We focused on sixteen case studies of actual experiments. The project involved a team of excellent researchers. We would like to thank
This article responds to increasing public and academic discourses on social innovation, which of... more This article responds to increasing public and academic discourses on social innovation, which often rest on the assumption that social innovation can drive societal change and empower actors to deal with societal challenges and a retreating welfare state. In order to scrutinise this assumption, this article proposes a set of concepts to study the dynamics of transformative social innovation and underlying processes of multi-actor (dis)empowerment. First, the concept of transformative social innovation is unpacked by proposing four foundational concepts to help distinguish between different pertinent 'shades' of change and innovation: 1) social innovation, (2) system innovation, (3) game-changers, and (4) narratives of change. These concepts, invoking insights from transitions studies and social innovations literature, are used to construct a conceptual account of how transformative social innovation emerges as a co-evolutionary interaction between diverse shades of change and innovation. Second, the paper critically discusses the dialectic nature of multi-actor (dis)empowerment that underlies such processes of change and innovation. The paper then demonstrates how the conceptualisations are applied to three empirical case-studies of transformative social innovation: Impact Hub, Time Banks and Credit Unions. In the conclusion we synthesise how the concepts and the empirical examples help to understand contemporary shifts in societal power relations and the changing role of the welfare state.
This paper assesses the role of urban experiments for local planning processes through a case-bas... more This paper assesses the role of urban experiments for local planning processes through a case-based analysis of the city lab of Maastricht. In conjunction with this, the article offers three contributions, as additional elements. Firstly, the paper develops a set of defining characteristics of city labs as an analytical concept which is relevant for discussions about (collaborative) planning. Secondly, it refines the literature on collaborative planning by drawing attention to experimentation and innovation. Thirdly, the paper assesses the potential of city labs to contribute to the innovation of urban governance. The work draws from the literature on experimentation and learning as well as the literature on collaborative urban planning. In the conclusions, we discuss the potential of city labs as vehicles for learning about new urban planning approaches and their limitations as spaces for small-scale experimentation. The paper is based on research for the URB@Exp research project f...
This paper was prepared for an OECD Workshop on the Benefits of Climate Policy: Improving Informa... more This paper was prepared for an OECD Workshop on the Benefits of Climate Policy: Improving Information for Policy Makers, held 12-13 December 2002. The aim of the Workshop and the underlying Project is to outline a conceptual framework to estimate the benefits of climate change policies, and to help organise information on this topic for policy makers. The Workshop covered both adaptation and mitigation policies, and related to different spatial and temporal scales for decision-making. However, particular emphasis was placed on understanding global benefits at different levels of mitigation-in other words, on the incremental benefit of going from one level of climate change to another. Participants were also asked to identify gaps in existing information and to recommend areas for improvement, including topics requiring further policy-related research and testing. The Workshop brought representatives from governments together with researchers from a range of disciplines to address these issues. Further background on the workshop, its agenda and participants, can be found on the internet at: www.oecd.org/env/cc The overall Project is overseen by the OECD Working Party on Global and Structural Policy (Environment Policy Committee). The Secretariat would like to thank the governments of Canada, Germany and the United States for providing extra-budgetary financial support for the work. This paper is issued as an authored "working paper"-one of a series emerging from the Project. The ideas expressed in the paper are those of the author alone and do not necessarily represent the views of the OECD or its Member Countries. As a working paper, this document has received only limited peer review. Some authors will be further refining their papers, either to eventually appear in the peer-reviewed academic literature, or to become part of a forthcoming OECD publication on this Project. The objective of placing these papers on the internet at this stage is to widely disseminate the ideas contained in them, with a view toward facilitating the review process.
Innovation and sustainable development are broad, general concepts with positive connotations whi... more Innovation and sustainable development are broad, general concepts with positive connotations which are widely used in the social sciences, but usually in an ambiguous, imprecise way. This paper examines various definitions and meanings of sustainability as a preliminary step in analysing sustainable technologies. The term “sustainable technologies” is actually incorrect since sustainable development is not a question of technology or organisation regarding the sustainability of firms but rather a systemic matter. It is wrong to consider certain technologies as sustainable because it is physically impossible for a technology to have no impact at all on the environment: all production and consumption actions have environmental impacts. “Innovation for sustainable development” is a complex idea, due to the opposing requirements (for support and control) that it entails. Innovation policy must take a systemic outlook regarding innovation that combines benefits for users and for society...
Most developed countries have innovation policies for green innovation. This paper examines the r... more Most developed countries have innovation policies for green innovation. This paper examines the rationale for such policies, offers a typology of eco-innovation and develops ten themes for ecoinnovation policy, which are: 1) the need for policy to be based on identified barriers, 2) preventing windfall profits, 3) specific versus generic support policies, 4) balance between policy measures and timing, 5) targeted spending in areas where innovation is needed, 6) missions, 7) strategic intelligence for innovation, 8) portfolios, 9) policy learning and 10) policy coordination and public-private interactions. Relevant cases are discussed and empirical information is provided. It is proposed that the ten themes serve as a framework for eco-innovation policy-making and policy evaluation.
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Papers by Rene Kemp