Innovation Journeys in Community Energy Initiatives

• PHD: INNOVATION JOURNEYS IN COMMUNITY ENERGY INITIATIVES (JAKE BARNES).

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Description

Gill Seyfang: · "Jake’s PhD research focuses on the micro level of community energy activity and seeks to inquire into the nature of community energy innovations and the journeys they undertake. As such it complements the meso level focus on ‘niches’ of the larger research project ‘Community Innovation for Sustainable Energy’ and develops temporal knowledge on how grassroots actors go about their innovations. It is expected that this micro level analysis is likely to find higher levels of contingency, reinvention, flux, expanding and contracting etc. than has previously been acknowledged within grassroots innovations literature and will develop insights into the particular challenges they faced.

The research uses a ‘social systems framework’ (after Van de Ven, 1993) as a means to understand the variety and diversity of actors involved in the sector and uses core innovation concepts of ideas, people, context, outcomes and process to inquire into community energy innovation journeys.

Jake aims to utilise a number of case studies of community energy innovation journeys in order to apply and test core innovation concepts. The case studies will be chosen on the basis of their difference: past and present, successful and failed, socially orientated or technology focussed and social or market-orientated." (http://grassrootsinnovations.org/2012/04/12/phd-innovation-journeys-in-community-energy-initiatives-jake-barnes/)