The need to increase the policy relevance of the functional approach to Technological Innovation Systems (TIS)☆
Introduction
In order to react to pressing societal or environmental issues such as climate change, evaluating different paths of technology innovation is a necessity for today's policy makers. The functional approach to technological innovation system (TIS) provides a tool to ascertain the various factors influencing the innovation and diffusion of individual technologies. The beauty of the analytical framework provided by the functional approach to TIS is that at once it reduces the complexity of technology dynamics while providing a systemic view of it. The functional approach is especially useful to “scan” a TIS and identify systemic weaknesses (Smits and Kuhlmann, 2004), also referred to as bottlenecks (Markard and Truffer, 2008). Jacobsson and Bergek (2011), (p. 42) argue that “the key contribution of innovation system analyses to the study of sustainability transitions is (…) that it provides policy makers with a tool for identifying system weaknesses”. We strongly agree with this view and hence increasing the field's policy relevance is the central issue/topic of this viewpoint. Reviewing existing literature that applies the functional approach to TIS we identified two issues which prevent the TIS literature from tapping its full potential in terms of policy relevance.
Section snippets
Justifying the technology choice
As many empirical TIS studies provide policy recommendations these papers take a normative position: What can policy do to support the innovation and diffusion of one specific technology? In fact, it has been argued, that many studies appear to have strong normative motivations (compare also Markard et al., 2009, Stirling, 2011), as opposed e.g. to the positive tradition often proclaimed in mainstream economics (Friedman, 1953). Taking a normative standpoint is in our view not problematic per
Making more workable policy recommendations
The second issue we identified deals with the goal of formulating workable policy recommendations. As mentioned above the TIS and functions approach is well suited to identify bottlenecks and pinpoint to systemic problems in a TIS, but so far many papers put forward policy recommendations which are rather generic and very broad1
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2020, Environmental Innovation and Societal TransitionsCitation Excerpt :For blocking mechanisms, system weaknesses that comprise the “strengthening/adding inducement mechanisms and weakening/removing blocking mechanisms” inform key policy issues (Bergek et al., 2008a:423)8 . Thus, the criticisms of generic or oversimplified policy recommendations (Bening et al., 2015; Kern, 2015) can be understood as consequence of these conceptual limitations. Recently, scholars have been discussing these issues of TIS hindering factors.
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2020, Technological Forecasting and Social ChangeCitation Excerpt :The analysis also brought forward however how the associated preoccupations with breakthrough and the removal of barriers easily obscure basic questions of direction: To what extent are the driverless cars qualifying as ‘niches’? Which socio-technical configuration should be cultivated, and for what purposes (Bening et al. 2015; Schlaile et al. 2017)? Undertaken in a directionality-conscious way, cultivation strategies need to be guided by a well-considered definition of the object of governance: Is it a vehicle, a communication network, or a certain system function that one seeks to stimulate?
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The present viewpoint is part and parcel of a debate about the challenges of TIS research in the current issue of EIST. See Truffer (2015) for an introduction and overview on the different contributions to the debate.