To address the challenges of energy transition necessary for sustainable development, incumbents must implement innovations, some of which are radical compared with their current competence-base or market solutions. This requires a thorough understanding of the prerequisites for implementing innovation. The literature on the factors influencing incumbents' implementation is vast and dispersed across multiple fields, with sometimes contradictory findings. As a result, it is difficult to get a clear picture what influences innovation implementation. This study explores the factors that condition the propensity of incumbent firms to implement radical innovations relevant to the energy transition and examines how these factors influence. A systematic literature review was conducted, covering 43 articles. The study identifies and explains the influence of 20 such factors on implementation. Nine factors are firm-external and relate to the themes of socioeconomic-political pressure, innovation conditions and industry conditions. Eleven factors are firm-internal and relate the themes of organisational properties, absorptive capacity, and internal alignment with the innovation. Causal relationships between these internal and external factors were discovered, as well as complementary influences on implementation. Potential future research venues are proposed, including scarcely recognized factors that merit further attention, factor complementarity and interdependency, and empirical gaps in terms of geographic context. It also offers policy and management implications, concluding that to gain a thorough understanding of the prerequisites for implementation, it is necessary to simultaneously consider a wide range of factors and their interconnectedness. © 2024 The Authors

Literature on intermediation in transitions has emphasised the importance of publicly promoting intermediation. To understand what drives authorities to financially promote intermediation, we conducted an exploratory study of 16 Swedish municipalities promoting an intermediary actor in the mobility transition, applying the framework of drivers of collaborative governance. The results highlight drivers common to most municipalities, including among others administrators’ awareness of collaboration challenges, or their inability to conduct intermediary activities on their own. However, the results also reveal diversity and context dependency of the drivers, leading to municipalities voicing diverse and partly conflicting expectations towards the intermediary. These findings underline the importance of understanding the promotion of intermediation through municipalities as a transactional and personal relationship between administrators and intermediaries. They also underline the relevance of “affective work” to mitigating conflicts caused by the diversity of expectations facing intermediaries, and the importance of municipalities in shaping local ecologies of intermediation. © 2025 The Author(s)

Implementing solar photovoltaic systems in the built environment (BEPV) is critical for the construction sector’s contribution to mitigating climate change. While previous studies give various insights into innovation implementation, the challenges to value co-creation by construction actors remain underexplored. By studying the alignment of business ecosystems implementing BEPV in the Swedish built environment, we address this need. Drawing on the cumulative experience of construction actors, this study demonstrates how knowledge mislocation, knowledge deficits, cultural discrepancies, insufficient building codes, frequently changing regulations, and implementing a highly embedded innovation can disturb ecosystem alignment. The study contributes to the ecosystem literature, scholarly discussions of innovation implementation in complex construction projects, and the PV diffusion literature by offering insights into the realignment of ecosystems involving value co-creation by actors from previously unconnected industries. The study links PV diffusion research to the construction management literature by exploring the cumulative experience of implementation at the micro level. We highlight the significant industry reconfigurations required to accommodate a deeply embedded technological innovation, reconfigurations going beyond the challenges of implementing systemic innovations encumbered by fewer material dependencies. We also emphasize the critical importance of industrial interaction, coordination, and learning to accelerate the sustainability transition. © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

There is limited understanding of how education initiatives geared toward faculty and support staff can foster a capacity for long-term and integrated societal engagement and collaboration within higher education institutions. Using the experiences from a cross-disciplinary pilot course in Sweden, the current study aims to identify features that explicate how skills and academic rigor for engaging in societal collaboration can be developed toward a “reflexive scholarship of societal collaboration.” Based on a case study of the course, we identify the need for (i) theoretical orientation, (ii) collective reflections among diverse participants, and (iii) application of gained knowledge in real-world contexts. Building on the experiences from the pilot course, we explore and discuss the participants’ reflections on how their partaking in the course may support a reflexive scholarship of societal collaboration. Our study is relevant to managers and policymakers interested in nurturing long-term and integrated collaborations between academia and various societal actors. © The Author(s) 2024.

This chapter explores the alignment between the stated intention of Swedish Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) to matter and the assessment of individuals to matter. To achieve this aim, HEIs collaboration strategies are compared with the criteria for the guidance for merits regarding docentship. Our analysis reveals a notable disparity: the societal collaboration visions outlined in strategies were rarely reflected in promotion guidelines. There is a substantial degree of variability in how these guidelines address collaboration merits. Despite the prevalence of ambitious strategies among HEIs, only a minority align these aspirations with guidelines that encompass the breadth and depth required for effective, high-quality collaboration. © The Author(s) 2024.

In this introductory chapter, we provide insights into the debates that inspired this volume. Our aim is to extend the boundaries of the concept societal interaction and discuss the conditions for universities to undertake such endeavors. Within this context, we introduce the matter of “mattering” which serves as the central theme that runs through this volume. Mattering, we posit, can be comprehended through three key concepts: collaboration, engagement, and impact. We outline how each concept contributes to an increasing understanding of the manifold ways in which mattering can be grasped and achieved. Furthermore, we provide an overview of the coherent set of individual chapters that, separately or jointly, deal with the three concepts. Through these chapters, this volume aims to make a valuable addition to the evolving literature that explores how universities can expand their impact beyond conventional higher education missions. Collectively, these chapters cover the context of the mattering of universities and draw on various empirical data sources, mainly from Sweden but also internationally. Within this compilation of inquiries, we shed light on the multifaceted impact of universities on societies, exploring the mechanisms, contexts, and temporal dimensions of their contributions to advancing knowledge and addressing societal challenges. © The Author(s) 2024.

This paper addresses the role of incumbent firms in driving transitions that entail multiple sectors, conditioned by multiple regimes. We analyse the case ‘HYBRIT’, a radical innovation venture championed by three incumbents from the steel and energy regimes. We investigate what conditions the incumbents’ agency and how they enacted their agency targeting restructuring of the regime elements–actors, institutions, and materiality. We find that eight endogenous and exogenous factors coincide and condition the incumbents’ agency, from which they act in a novel direction of change. We contribute by showing how the collaboration within and across regimes enabled the accomplishment of actions that would have been challenging for individual incumbents to achieve alone. In this setting of scale-intensive industries, incumbents have characteristics that give them a significantly larger capacity to stimulate change than newcomers. The timing and combination of endogenous and exogenous factors, enabling incumbents to collectively drive a transition. © 2024 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Despite its proven societal value, humanities knowledge tends to be marginalized in research policy; this has been a topic of debate for some time. In this chapter, we focus on the valorization of humanities knowledge, with the aim of comprehending the way this process engenders societal impact. We argue that historical impact stories offer an effective methodological approach for a deeper understanding of such valorization and its subsequent impact. Drawing on three humanities research cases from Sweden, we propose that valorization and impacts of humanities knowledge should be seen as processual and as influenced by societal actors who determine the premises and condition the somewhat unpredictable nature of such impacts. We introduce two concepts: (i) acting space, which involves access to collaborators, audiences, and channels that enable knowledge valorization, and (ii) meandering knowledge flows, which provides insight into the uneven and hard-to-predict nature of valorization. Through these concepts, we wish to provide a better and more nuanced understanding of how knowledge valorization in the humanities unfolds. By doing so, we hope to support humanities scholars to find ways of articulating their own modes of mattering. © The Author(s) 2024.

Transitioning the energy sector to meet sustainability challenges requires introducing innovative solutions for energy production, storage, flexibility, security, and consumption (Fahnestock and Karltorp, 2019). Some of these innovations will be radical compared to incumbent firms’ competence base, solutions, and market attributes (Bergek et al., 2013). Although some energy utilities embrace innovation, most of these incumbents are inert due to significant lock-in effects of infrastructures and facilities.

While a larger body of research focuses on incumbents as developers of innovation (Klepper, 1997; Christensen, 1997/2013), less attention is paid to the factors that influence incumbents’ ability to implement radical innovation. A review of the comparatively few existing studies reveals that a) a combination of firm internal and external factors needs to be accounted for, b) factors are interdependent and form complex causal relations, and c) the same outcome related to adoption may result from different combinations of conditions as revealed by contradictions (Karltop and Perez Vico, forthcoming). Yet, no existing studies examine the complex casual relationships as configurations of factors that combine to contribute to incumbents’ propensity to implement radical innovations. Thus, we study how incumbent firms’ internal and external characteristics contribute to implementing radical innovation in the form of configurations of factors, using regional energy firms as empirical case.

We explore this question using a qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) that enables us to consider the effects of multiple causal factors and their complex causal relationships on a particular outcome, such as the propensity to implement radical innovation (Ragin, 2008). We use a comparative case study of eight Swedish public regional energy firms to explore the influence of factors derived from a recent literature review (Karltop and Perez Vico, forthcoming) that include external landscape, financial, technology, and industry conditions, as well as firm internal structural conditions, absorptive capacity and alignment with innovation. We base the analysis on semi-structured interviews with firm representatives and qualitative and quantitative data from media, annual reports, economic databases, and funding agencies.

Our analysis generates multiple solutions in the form of configurations of different factors contributing to incumbents’ propensity to implement radical innovations. These solutions reveal how factors amplify or offset each other and provide insight into different development paths for incumbents seeking to implement radical innovation. This paves the way for building a coherent theoretical frame for understanding incumbents in the light of radical innovation that accounts for multiple causes related to the firm’s structure, strategy, and external conditions.

Our findings have several management and policy implications. To implement radical innovation necessary for energy transitions, firms and policy makers must simultaneously pay attention to the multiple ways in which internal and external conditions may interact. Although some factors are beyond the firm’s control, managers could focus on the factors that moderate others, as these represent an opportunity for compensation. With this study, we also contribute to the field of transition studies by exploring a configurational approach to understanding the role of incumbents in meeting sustainability challenges.