Coping with System Failure: Why Connectivity Matters to Innovation Policy

This chapter is concerned with policy and the role of the European Technology Platforms as new experimental policy tools for structuring change. The problem discussed here concerns a change in the current European energy system towards a better integration of low-carbon technologies enabling it to reach its climate goals for 2020. The chapter’s research strategy stresses the importance of relations rather than the determinism of technology or ideas. As a result, the chapter’s structural analysis shows how firms in the modern European economy work, on a collective level, from within the political system to create new institutional structures in the economy. A major social network analysis examines how connectivity in two specific European ‘technology’ platforms’ networks has changed and evolved in relation to researching the solutions to solving major societal problems, and therefore has also driven innovation towards new business opportunities. The analysis shows how connectivity and network relations play an important role in innovation, as opposed to arm-length anonymous interactions as presumed in mainstream economic thinking.