Disruptive Low-Carbon Innovation

Description

Charles Tyfield:

"The idea of DLCI was first raised 10 years ago, and subsequently taken up with special focus on developing countries , especially China . What is DLCI and why is it important? Against the stream of current discussion, our starting point here is the seminal work of Christensen. While addressing a business strategy readership and not specifically concerned with low-carbon transition, Christensen’s work nonetheless furnishes a broad but rigorous definition of ‘disruptive innovation’ (DI). This concerns “cheaper, easier-to-use alternatives to existing products or services often produced by non-traditional players that target previously ignored customers” [2] and/or their use in novel contexts and combinations. This contrasts disruptive innovation with ‘sustaining innovation’ along existing, stabilized techno-economic trajectories. The former thus effects a social redefinition of existing technologies through recombination, thereby offering possibly lower functionality against existing metrics initially. Over time, though, such innovation may ‘disrupt’ at varying levels, as new low-cost offerings attract not only users previously unable to afford these technological affordances, but also increasingly the incumbent ‘mainstream’ market.

The particular promise of low-carbon DI rests in precisely these characteristics: low-cost, rapid (driven by its own spontaneous demand) global deployment of existing technologies in novel combinations (and incremental improvements thereof) can be favourably compared with the default (and stalling) model of low-carbon transition. The latter focuses on supply or production of high-cost new-to-the-world technologies from high-risk, slow and uncertain RDD&D processes. Aligning with and corroborating criticisms of this dominant techno-fetishistic narrative, a focus on such DLCI, and its social redefinition of (probably existing) technologies, also directly opens up the importance of socio-technological and systems issues."

(https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214629617303523?via%3Dihub)