Publication Laka-library:
Cultural legitimacy and innovation journeys: A new perspective applied to Dutch and British nuclear power
| Author | B.Verhees |
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6-01-0-40-83.pdf |
| Date | November 2011 |
| Classification | 6.01.0.40/83 (HISTORY / DEVELOPMENT NUCLEAR ENERGY) |
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From the publication:
Cultural Legitimacy and Innovation Journeys A New Perspective Applied to Dutch and British Nuclear Power Bram Verhees 2011 Chapter 1: Introduction 1.1 Research topic and audience This dissertation is about cultural legitimacy in relation to innovation journeys; that is, about longitudinal processes of technological development and their societal embedding. One way to understand these longitudinal processes is offered by the ‘technology life cycles’ model. Often used in technology management literature, it explains technology development as proceeding along a sigmoid function (‘S-curve’) over time. Its initial slow growth (e.g. in terms of market shares) is characterized by uncertainty about markets and functions and low technical performance, but growth accelerates as a dominant design emerges. Technical performance improves until a saturation point is reached, which is characterized by decreasing growth rates in terms of market shares and diminishing returns in terms of technical performance improvements (Geels, 2002). However, this approach has been criticized as being overly simplistic and deterministic: by comparing longitudinal case histories of innovation development, organizational scholars have found that innovations rarely (if ever) develop along such stylized and predictable curves (Van de Ven et al., 1989). So instead, I use the term ‘innovation journey’ (Van de Ven et al., 2008; Schot and Geels, 2008), because the journey metaphor captures the longitudinal, open-ended and uncertain character of the process and emphasizes agency, twists and turns and dead ends. Van de Ven et al. (2008) define ‘innovation journey’ as a nonlinear cycle of divergent and convergent activities that may repeat over time and at different organizational levels if resources are obtained to renew the cycle (Van de Ven, 2008: 16). In spite of their heterogeneity and complexity, recurring ‘patterns of commonality’ were found in empirical studies of technological development processes. This observation resulted in a characterization of innovation journeys as proceeding in a nondeterministic fashion through a set of phases characterized by distinctly different entrepreneurial activities (Van de Ven et al., 2008: 23).