The Context of Innovation: How Established Actors Affect the Prospects of Bio-SNG Technology in Switzerland

Abstract

The implementation of new technological fields is a complex, multi-faceted process. At the outset, it is highly uncertain whether a new technology will succeed, how and where it will be applied, which kind of actors will become involved or how business models will look like. These issues, among others, depend on how an emerging technological field becomes connected with organizations as well as institutional structures in established sectors. Technology development will be shaped by institutional structures that prevail in the corresponding sector. Furthermore, actors from this sector are likely to play a particular role in the innovation process. The development path of a novel technology, in other words, may strongly depend on how the technology links up (or not) with existing sectors. In the study of emerging technological fields, a systematic analysis of context structures should therefore be a crucial element. With this article, we will illustrate how such a context analysis can look like and we will empirically demonstrate how developments in adjacent fields can influence an emerging technology. For this kind of analysis, a conceptual basis is needed that accounts for the complexity and non-linear nature of the underlying processes and the possibly large variety of different context developments. Innovation system approaches, and the technological innovation systems (TIS) perspective in particular, have lately received increasing attention for the study of emerging technologies (e.g. Bergek and Jacobsson 2003; Bergek et al. 2008b; Carlsson et al. 2002; Negro et al. 2008; Jacobsson 2008).