This paper concerns the emergence and diffusion of radical innovations in the context of sustainability transitions. We confront the typical understanding in the Strategic Niche Management framework with an in-depth longitudinal case study of French modern tramways (1971–2016), which represents a particular technology class: local infrastructure systems. The case confirms the relevance of existing SNM-concepts, but also points to three pattern deviations: 1) incumbent actors from neighbouring regimes can play a leading role in the development of radical alternatives, 2) the early formulation of highly specific visions can effectively guide search paths (as opposed to a usual prescription about more open-ended approaches to foster innovative variety creation), and 3) particularly influential projects (which we call ‘landmark projects’) can decisively accelerate innovation developments. Exploring a greater variety of diffusion and transition patterns (based on temporal interactions of causal mechanisms and varying roles played by different actors) is a fruitful way forward for sustainability transitions research.

We assess the relationship between a firm’s compensation structure and its exploratory innovation. Specifically, we focus on the dispersion of a firm’s compensation structure. Drawing from compensation theories, we argue that horizontal and vertical dispersions of a firm’s compensation structure differ in their effects on R&D employees’ behavioral tendencies, which in turn are related to the exploratory innovation output of a firm. We test our argument with a 6-year panel dataset of 81 high technology firms in the U.S. We use the compensation records of 671,114 R&D personnel from 1997 to 2002 to construct pay dispersion measures for these firms in the panels and link these measures with the firms’ patent innovations filed in the U.S. We find that horizontal pay dispersion is negatively related to a firm’s exploratory innovation output, but there is no statistically significant relationship between vertical pay dispersion and exploration. In addition, the negative relationship between horizontal pay dispersion and exploration is mitigated in firms with older R&D employees on average and in firms where the age variance of R&D employees is greater.

Among the various forms of academic misconduct, text recycling or ‘self-plagiarism’ holds a particularly contentious position as a new way to game the reward system of science. A recent case of alleged ‘self-plagiarism’ by the prominent Dutch economist Peter Nijkamp has attracted much public and regulatory attention in the Netherlands. During the Nijkamp controversy, it became evident that many questions around text recycling have only partly been answered and that much uncertainty still exists. While the conditions of fair text reuse have been specified more clearly in the wake of this case, the extent and causes of problematic text recycling remain unclear. In this study, we investigated the extent of problematic text recycling in order to obtain understanding of its occurrence in four research areas: biochemistry & molecular biology, economics, history and psychology. We also investigated some potential reasons and motives for authors to recycle their text, by testing current hypotheses in scholarly literature regarding the causes of text recycling. To this end, an analysis was performed on 922 journal articles, using the Turnitin plagiarism detection software, followed by close manual interpretation of the results. We observed considerable levels of problematic text recycling, particularly in economics and psychology, while it became clear that the extent of text recycling varies substantially between research fields. In addition, we found evidence that more productive authors are more likely to recycle their papers. In addition, the analysis provides insight into the influence of the number of authors and the existence of editorial policies on the occurrence of problematic text recycling.

A founding assumption and aim of the sociotechnical approach to sustainability transitions was the need to develop frameworks to understand major systemic changes that would be required across the entire chain of production, distribution and consumption. However, most studies have so far focused on partial aspects of the entire chain, often a single, radical technology innovation. Therefore, since the founding ambition remains largely unrealized, the paper aims to contribute to transition scholarship by developing an approach for ‘whole-system’ analysis. As a second contribution, we argue that this broader unit of analysis calls for greater attention to the architecture of the system in terms of how constituent elements are linked to one another. To elaborate this point, we develop a reconfiguration approach, based on conceptual extensions to the multi-level perspective, analysing both techno-economic developments and socio-institutional developments. This approach draws attention to the multiplicity and interdependencies of change processes that constitute transitions, including incremental change, component substitution, symbiotic add-ons, knock-on effects and changes to the system architecture. A third contribution is to make an empirical whole-system analysis of the low-carbon reconfiguration of the UK electricity system between 1990 and 2016. This is important and timely, because it allows socio-technical transition approaches to ‘speak’ at the same empirical whole-system level that dominates current long-term, low-carbon (modelling) analysis and associated political and public debate. This consequently enables a demonstration of the added value of the whole-system reconfiguration approach. Our findings show that early reconfiguration of the UK electricity system was dominated by modular changes within the generation and consumption subsystems; and more recently, how these earlier changes have triggered a new focus on the whole system architecture, anticipating deeper changes to the linkages between the generation, network and consumption subsystems.

In this paper we investigate whether the novelty content of innovations introduced by Norwegian manufacturing firms reflect the composition of work-life experiences collected by employees. Distinguishing between ‘related’ (RV) and ‘unrelated’ (URV) variety and using employer-employee registers merged with Community Innovation Survey data to observe experiences prior to innovation strategies and results, we find the probability of incremental innovation increasing strongly with RV when firms are located in a large-city region. URV provide additional support for incremental innovation among firms that are not R&D active, and increases more generally the probability of radical (new-to-the world) innovation. However, these relationships flatten out at moderate levels, and the maximum impact of URV on radical innovation is limited compared to the average impact of firms’ R&D efforts. Thus, whereas incremental innovation is highly receptive to related worker experiences when collected and combined in urban contexts, radical innovation depend to a larger degree on the innovation strategies and efforts of the firm itself.