Finnish energy and climate policy already features wide experimentation, visioning and long-term roadmaps. Yet transition arenas could help connect these existing instruments, particularly if redesigned for a mid-range timescale. We improved the path creation toolsets and procedures to create more detailed pathways and analyses of pathway step interrelations.
In this paper we elaborate on how practice theories can inform the discussion of experimentation, report specific modes of experimentation and innovation, and derive suggestions for effective policy interventions. We also bring forward a set of generic suggestions for more sensitive, appreciative and effective public policies on sustainability transitions and cast experimentation in a particular and partial role in such policies.
We examine the reasons why lead user method (LUM) is not adopted in an organisation after a successful pilot project. We use rich, longitudinal data from two case companies and find that despite stated intentions and enthusiasm, LUM is not applied repeatedly. The specific reasons for this as well as the requirements for successful LUM adoption are discussed.
Consumers support the proliferation of sustainable energy technology in contexts where institutions and technology characteristics are not yet fully developed for the wide proliferation. We investigated how consumer created technology solutions diffused. We found that a over one third of projects were part of “innovative peer diffusion” adaptations and further modifications carried out among peers.
We address the investment gap in renewable energy sources. Examining the case of Finland, which introduced policy measures to diversify its renewable energy portfolio, we analyse the development of investments in renewable heat and power in response to new policy measures and contextual factors during the downturn period 2009–2013. In spite of a severe financial recession, we find an emergence of new sources of investment.
The New Production of Users traces the history of designer-user relations from the era of mass production to the present days. Its focus lies in elaborating the currently emerging strategies and approaches to user involvement in business and citizen contexts. It analyses the challenges in the practical collaborations between designers and users, and it investigates a number of cases, where groups of users collectively took charge of innovation.
By examining mobility in remote Arctic areas, we analyze how challenging environmental conditions, while affecting technology performance, evoke people’s creativity and efforts as technology users. Based on historical materials and ethnographic observations of user inventiveness in the transport sector in the Russian North, we define and document a phenomenon of “proximal design” in three different modes.
Innovation intermediaries play an important role in open innovation endeavors. Our longitudinal case study captures the variety and evolution of work tasks and roles of user-side innovation intermediaries during and after a four-year technology project in a living lab.
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