The impending climate emergency, the Paris agreement and Sustainable Development Goals demand significant transformations in economies and societies. Science funders, innovation agencies, and scholars have explored new rationales and processes for policymaking, such as transformative innovation policy (TIP). Here, we address the question of how to orient the efforts of science, technology, and innovation policy actors to enable transformations. We build on sustainability transitions research and a 4-year co-creation journey of the TIP Consortium to present twelve transformative outcomes that can guide public policy agencies in evaluating and reformulating their projects, programmes, and policies. We illustrate the transformative outcomes in two empirical cases: transitions towards mobility-as-a-service in the Finnish transport system and the emergence of speciality coffee in Colombia. We argue that the twelve transformative outcomes can guide public policy agents to fundamentally transform their ways of thinking and operation in advancing transformative change.

Missions may be regarded as a narrative for challenge-oriented policies, as a rationale for directional policies, and as an instrument for coordinating distributed innovation efforts. While the attention for mission-oriented innovation policy is rising, there are still many questions regarding both the governance and the conduct of missions as well as the (adverse) effects they might have on innovation and societal challenges. This research perspective reflects on what missions are, what they can do and potentially engender, and how they can be studied empirically. Rather than a static, predetermined, and closed-off instrument, we contend that missions are best understood as continuously interacting with the structures and interests of governments, markets, and society, aligning (1) problem-based governance targeting societal challenges and (2) innovation governance targeting novelty creation and deployment. This characterisation of missions, as embedded and evolving, advances empirical questions that could guide research into unexplored directions.

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Urban experimentation has proliferated in recent years as a response to sustainability challenges and renewed pressures on urban governance. In many European cities, diverse and rapidly changing experimental forms (e.g. urban living laboratories, pilots, trials, experimental districts) are becoming commonplace, addressing ambitious goals for smartness, circularity, and liveability. Academically, there is a growing concern for moving beyond the focus on individual experiments and the insistence on upscaling their primary transformation mechanism. However, the phenomena of ‘projectification’ – whereby project-based forms of organising have become ubiquitous, shaping expectations about experimentation – is increasingly perceived as a barrier. Nevertheless, how specifically experimentation and projectification intersect remains unclear. Our theoretical perspective examines how the widespread tendency towards projectification shapes urban experimentation and the potential implications for urban transformations. It problematises the current wave of experimentation and how it contributes to the projectification of urban change processes. We present three steps to redress this issue and indicate directions for future research.

Urban experimentation with sustainability has been gaining prominence in policy and academic discourses about urban transformations, spurring the creation of urban living laboratories and transition arenas. However, the academic literature has only begun examining why experimentation flourishes in particular cities, and why it conforms to place-specific styles. Meanwhile, the strategic niche management (SNM) tradition has extensively explored how protective spaces for experimentation emerge but has dealt only tangentially with why this happens in particular places. In this paper, we develop an approach for unpacking the formation of favourable environments for experimentation in specific places. We adopt an abductive research design to create a dialogue between distinct theoretical positions and one in-depth case study. Our case examines the formation of the Bristol energy scene, which hosts a variety of experimental initiatives concerning civic energy alternatives. Based on our findings, we refine the understanding of the processes shaping this experimental setting. There is value in characterising the 'genealogy' of experimental spaces and acknowledging their antecedents, path-dependencies and place-specificities. Efforts to foster urban transformation demand nuanced accounts of how places become experimental because they are not static backgrounds for experimentation.