While experimentation is at the heart of sustainability transitions, little attention has been paid to policy experimentation and its effects in advancing transitions. Drawing on the literatures on policy experimentation and institutional change in the context of sustainability transitions, we analyse an in-depth case study of the development of Mobility as a Service (MaaS) in Finland – one of the first countries globally to advance MaaS by government support. Our findings show how a potentially disruptive innovation, MaaS, can be traced back to a longer process of administrative reorientation and restructuring, i.e. gradual transformation in institutions, and has benefitted from cycles of policy experimentation, combined with the sequencing of policy strategies and further changes in the policy mix. Administrative restructuring has enabled policy experimentation that has led - via new vision building, networking and learning - to major regulatory change allowing market creation for MaaS. We conclude that the dynamics of policy mixes in transitions are influenced by short-term policy experimentation and long-term institutional change. More generally, institutional change is vital for enabling a favourable context for policy experimentation in sustainability transitions that in turn provides cognitive and normative learning to inform further institutional change.

The relationship between national regulation and job creation remains highly debated. The “public choice” perspective holds that regulation hinders job creation through compliance costs and regulatory capture. Meanwhile, the “public interest” view suggests that regulation can facilitate employment growth by promoting innovation and fair competition. We offer a contingency perspective, i.e., that national regulation's effects vary across heterogeneous state political institutions. Drawing on the political science theory of market-preserving federalism, we argue that state-level economic freedom moderates the effects of national regulation on local net job creation. Using U.S. data, we find support for this moderating hypothesis. National regulation destroys jobs on net in states with low economic freedom. However, national regulation has no effect in states with high economic freedom; this effect holds for tax freedom and labor market freedom. The moderation is concentrated among mature firms rather than young firms, and in metro counties rather than non-metro counties; furthermore, it is robust across multiple regulatory measures and instrumental variables approaches. Our work reveals that state political institutions have an underappreciated influence on the costs of national regulation, demonstrating the interdependence of policies for local economic development.

Publications in top journals today have a powerful influence on academic careers although there is much criticism of using journal rankings to evaluate individual articles. We ask why this practice of performance evaluation is still so influential. We suggest this is the case because a majority of authors benefit from the present system due to the extreme skewness of citation distributions. “Performance paradox” effects aggravate the problem. Three extant suggestions for reforming performance management are critically discussed. We advance a new proposal based on the insight that fundamental uncertainty is symptomatic for scholarly work. It suggests focal randomization using a rationally founded and well-orchestrated procedure.

Since its emergence in the 1980s, the concept of “Innovation Systems” (IS) has inspired research and shaped discussions in academia and policy alike, leading to a cascading development of approaches and extensions at various analytic levels. IS research has expanded far beyond its initial focus by generating new knowledge within but also attracting increased attention from adjacent fields. As a result, the broad understanding of IS and its diversity in applications has resulted in blurry boundaries of the field, making its contemporary delineation, synthesis, and assessment of its progress challenging. Using a combination of data-driven techniques from bibliometrics, natural language processing, and network analysis, this paper maps and analyzes the structure of knowledge production and the process of knowledge integration in current research. We find an overall growing tendency toward increasing diversity in the knowledge bases from which the field draws, accompanied by a decreasing coherence of collective research efforts. We point to the crucial role of institutions and academic entrepreneurs in shaping these developments in interdisciplinary and diverse fields, illustrating this by the role of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

We are very grateful to the editor of this virtual Special Section, Ben Martin, to open up the discussion on our proposal of partly random selection of publications (Osterloh and Frey, 2020). At first glance, our proposal might look crazy. Consider, however, the quote attributed to Albert Einstein: “if at first an idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it”. Our reply takes up three considerations discussed by the commentators Oswald (2019), Wooding (2019) and Yaqub (2019): (1) additional aspects to our paper; (2) the discussion about how bad the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is if applied to evaluate single articles; and (3) how to overcome JIF.

Complex societal or environmental problems require fast and substantial socio-technical transitions. For instance, in the case of climate change, these transitions need to take place in the energy, transport and several industry sectors. To induce and accelerate such transitions, numerous policy interventions are required, which interact with each other in policy mixes. While several conceptual studies on policy mixes have been published recently, there is very little empirical research apart from single case or small-n studies. It has been prominently argued that the debate about policy mixes has reached an impasse partly due to this lack of empirical work. This paper addresses this gap by providing a first analysis of the temporal dynamics of complex policy mixes. To do so, we develop a conceptualization and measurement of policy mix balance across instrument types as well as policy mix design features (in the form of intensity as a general and technology specificity as a technology-focused design feature). This allows us to answer the question how temporal dynamics of policy mixes differ between countries regarding their balance and design features. Our measurement approach is developed bottom-up, i.e., policies are assessed individually and then aggregated systematically at the policy mix level. This enables overcoming the ‘dependent variable problem in the study of policy change’, i.e., the problem of measuring policy output. More specifically, we develop a comparative dataset of 522 renewable energy policies in nine OECD countries. Our analysis shows that countries’ policy mix dynamics vary strongly regarding some variables (e.g., technology specificity) but less regarding others (e.g., balance). As a validity check, we also test the effects of these mix dynamics on policy outcome in the form of renewable energy technology diffusion. We reflect our findings in light of the theoretical debates around policy mixes and policy design and discuss how our results provoke an agenda for the new generation of research on policy mixes. We specifically discuss avenues for future research with a particular focus on the ‘politics of policy mixes’.

Policy mixes may play a crucial role in redirecting and accelerating innovation towards low-carbon solutions, thus addressing a key societal challenge. Towards this end, some argue that the characteristics of such policy mixes matter greatly, yet with little empirical evidence backing up such claims. In this paper we explore this link between policy mix characteristics and low-carbon innovation, using the research case of the transition of the German electricity system towards renewable energy. Our empirical insights are based on an innovation survey administered to German manufacturers of renewable power generation technologies which builds on the Community Innovation Survey. For our purposes we adjusted the survey to better capture companies’ perceptions of policy mixes. Employing a bivariate Tobit model we find evidence that companies’ perceptions regarding the consistency and credibility of the policy mix are positively associated with their innovation expenditures for renewable energies, and this positive link intensifies when considering the mutual interdependence of these policy mix characteristics. In contrast, neither the comprehensiveness of the instrument mix nor the coherence of policy processes were found to be related to innovation expenditures. Overall, these findings suggest that future research on low-carbon and eco-innovation should pay greater attention to the characteristics of policy mixes, rather than focusing on policy instruments only. Finally, our findings indicate a need to consider how policy may be measured in innovation surveys to generate better informed policy advice regarding the greening of innovation.