g., through ‘internal’ networking with similar initiatives by participating in workshops, organizing site visits, and publishing handbooks. Advocates might also collaborate in shaping the institutional environment more directly through ‘external’ networking, for example, by setting up field-level organizations that lobby governments,
user selleck chemicals groups, science actors, or relevant business actors for beneficial institutional changes. Socio-technical experiments can encompass a wide range of projects, pilot plants, and demonstration facilities initiated by firms, public research organizations and universities, community and grassroots organizations, and so on (Berkhout et al. 2010). In this literature, experiments are seen as playing a key role in the development of innovations that have the capacity to modify or even replace dominant ‘socio-technical regimes’. Regimes constitute the extant social, institutional, and technological fabric GDC-0941 chemical structure of economic activity. Experiments may involve novel technological, actor, and market configurations, and are, therefore, likely to face considerable initial uncertainties, problems, misalignments, and high costs compared with conventional, incumbent regimes to which
they offer more sustainable alternatives. Previous research on the niche development of sustainable energy systems (primarily set in high-income countries) has concentrated on technological experiments and their role in regime change. Few studies have focused on entrepreneurial firms and their importance as prime movers. Entrepreneurs do have an important role in transition processes, since they are agents of creative destruction, with the potential to commercialize sustainable innovations and, consequently, foster the necessary institutional change that favors such innovations (Markard and Truffer 2008). Analytical approach and data collection On the basis of the literature reviewed above, we propose the following dimensions of upscaling for investigating the cases in this paper: 1. Quantitative: upscaling in terms of
the number of beneficiaries (Uvin and Miller Branched chain aminotransferase 1994; Uvin 1995). 2. Organizational: upscaling in terms of expanding the capacity of existing business, i.e., developing resources, building a knowledge base, employing more people, or developing management systems (Klein 2008; Westall 2007). 3. Geographical: upscaling in terms of regional expansion, i.e., serving more people in new regions and extending into new markets (Klein 2008; Karamchandani et al. 2009). 4. Deep: upscaling in the sense of achieving greater impact in an existing location, e.g., through reaching increasingly poorer segments of the population (Rogers et al. 2006; Smith and Stevens 2010). 5. Functional: upscaling in terms of developing new products and services (Klein 2008). 6. Replication: upscaling in terms of the replication of a particular business model, by supporting and incubating new entrepreneurs (Westall 2007). 7.