Reaching a better understanding of the policies and politics of transitions presents a main agenda item in the emerging field of sustainability transitions. One important requirement for these transitions, such as the move towards a decarbonized energy system, is the redirection and acceleration of technological change, for which policies play a key role. In this regard, several studies have argued for the need to combine different policy instruments in so-called policy mixes. However, existing policy mix studies often fall short of reflecting the complexity and dynamics of actual policy mixes, the underlying politics and the evaluation of their impacts. In this paper we take a first step towards an extended, interdisciplinary policy mix concept based on a review of the bodies of literature on innovation studies, environmental economics and policy analysis. The concept introduces a clear terminology and consists of the three building blocks elements, policy processes and characteristics, which can be delineated by several dimensions. Based on this, we discuss its application as analytical framework for empirical studies analyzing the impact of the policy mix on technological change. Throughout the paper we illustrate the proposed concept by using the example of the policy mix for fostering the transition of the German energy system to renewable power generation technologies. Finally, we derive policy implications and suggest avenues for future research.

This study analyses the impact of formal standards and regulation on firms’ innovation efficiency, considering different levels of market uncertainty. We argue that formal standards and regulation have different effects, depending on the extent of market uncertainty derived from theoretical considerations about information asymmetry and regulatory capture. Our empirical analysis is based on the German Community Innovation Survey (CIS). The results show that formal standards lead to lower innovation efficiency in markets with low uncertainty, while regulations have the opposite effect. In cases of high market uncertainty, we observe that regulation leads to lower innovation efficiency, while formal standards have the reverse effect. Our results have important implications for the future application of both instruments, showing that their benefits heavily depend on the market environment.

The role of deployment policies that aim to foster technological change has grown considerably, especially in the fields of energy and climate. However, recent research has shown that the adoption of deployment policies carries the potential of locking in the technology that is most cost-effective at the point of policy introduction, but may be inefficient in the long term. The present paper contributes to the emerging literature on the role of deployment policies in creating path-dependency and eventually technology lock-in. While previous studies focused on the relationship between lock-in and the technology-specificity of deployment policies, this paper introduces a new factor: the existence of multiple applications for a technology. We argue that this factor is highly relevant for technological lock-in and should be considered by policy makers. To support our argument, we simulate the competition among four stationary battery technologies across energy system applications in an investment simulation model. This simulation shows that the degree of competition among technologies differs strongly across applications, which corresponds with a highly varying lock-in probability. Hence, selecting applications in deployment policies very likely corresponds to selecting technologies. We discuss the implications of these results for both policy makers and for the academic debate on deployment policies and technological lock-in as well as on technology assessment and governance more generally. Based on the notion that policies can have different technology-specificity levels, we develop the idea of the application-specificity of policies and provide examples of currently enacted deployment policies that vary in terms of their technology and application specificity.