Sustainable markets for green technologies: EABIS 11th Annual Colloquium

It’s not just businesses that ‘do business’. Whilst engineers and scientists leading the development of new technologies may have direct commercial interests in a technology, they also have a broader interest in promoting widespread adoption of ‘their’ innovative technology. The strategies and actions of engineers and scientists, and their commercial and business advisers, are of critical importance to the adoption, impact and value of a technology in the long-term. This paper addresses strategic innovation for sustainability from the perspective of engineers and scientists leading the development of ‘green’ technologies. We consider what scope there is to influence the adoption of their technology and how this might be done, based on the case of a new, disruptive technology (Schmidt and Druehl, 2008; Yu and Hang, 2010). Our focal technology is the Pyroformer, for intermediate pyrolysis of biomass. This paper/presentation is the first output of a project designed to understand how a commercial infrastructure can be developed to enable widespread adoption. Factors which enable or constrain adoption will be identified, at a local, project level and at a wider programme level, taking a holistic view of the network of project and programme actors from business and public organizations. The primary perspective is that of university-based engineers leading the development of the technology, and their advisors. Their choices and actions are critical to the long-term commercial viability of technically promising innovation. They not only have to get the technology right but they play a vital role in shaping the commercial networks associated with early adoption sites. Across multiple sites over time, they shape the commercial infrastructure for a new technology.