Suchergebnisse

Due to its environmental impact, the mobility system is increasingly under pressure. The challenges to cope with climate change, air quality, depleting fossil resources imply the need for a transition of the current mobility system towards a more sustainable one. Expectations and visions have been identified as crucial in the guidance of such transitions, and more specifically of actor strategies. Still, it remained unclear why the actors involved in transition activities appear to change their strategies frequently and suddenly. The empirical analysis of the expectations and strategies of three actors in the field of hydrogen and fuel cell technology indicates that changing actor strategies can be explained by rather volatile expectations related to different levels. Our case studies of the strategies of two large car manufacturers and the German government demonstrate that the car manufacturers refer strongly to expectations about the future regime, while expectations related to the socio-technical landscape level appear to be crucial for the strategy of the German government.

Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of research and innovation futures, sketch the landscape of recent findings in this field with a focus on new ways of doing and organizing knowledge creation and position the contributions to this special issue within that landscape.


Design/methodology/approach
This paper includes a review of literature on the embedding of research and innovation in society, outlines the main domains of current drivers of change and summarises the contributions to the special issue.


Findings
Recent controversies about the future of research and innovation draw on a long-standing trajectory of debate about the role of science, technology and innovation in society, and the balance between autonomy in striving for scientific excellence on the one hand and the quest for social and economic relevance on the other. Six major domains of current and expected future changes in research and innovation are identified, and serve as the backdrop for positioning the more specific contributions to this special issue.


Originality/value
The main value of this contribution is to provide a condensed and original look at emerging directions of change in research and innovation practices and their organisational and institutional embedding in society.

AbstractWe aim for a better conceptualization of mission-oriented innovation policy (MIP). Our starting point is an analytical decomposition of societal problems and innovative solutions based on three dimensions of wickedness: (1) contestation; (2) complexity; and (3) uncertainty. We argue that both problems and solutions can be divergent (contested, complex, and uncertain) or convergent (uncontested, well-defined, and informed). Based on the resulting problem–solution typology, we suggest a process-oriented view on MIP and discuss three alternative pathways along which convergence between problems and solutions can be achieved to come from wicked problems to legitimate solutions. We illustrate these pathways using examples for different societal problems related to health (smoking bans), security (CCTV), and energy (wind turbines). For policy makers, locating a societal challenge in this problem–solution space, and implementing policy strategies to achieve problem and solution convergence, is expected to accelerate both the legitimacy of a mission and the resulting solutions.

Abstract
Recent times have seen the rediscovery and adaptation of mission-oriented innovation policies (MIPs) for driving transformative change. While such policies seek to mobilise and align stakeholders, little is known about how missions feature in policy coordination processes. We argue that to facilitate the still troublesome operationalisation of MIPs, it is essential to understand missions as 'boundary objects' that have some shared meanings among the participants they convene, yet are open enough to be interpreted differently by distinct actors gathering in four interconnected policy arenas—i.e. a strategic, programmatic, implementation, and performance arena. By studying the European Commission's Horizon Europe missions, we unravel how missions as boundary objects enable and disable the coordination of heterogeneous communities. The resulting analytical perspective highlights three key mechanisms for coordinating mission meanings across communities and arenas: convergence–divergence, passage, and reflexive learning. We conclude with research avenues for studying missions as boundary objects for facilitating concerted action.