Would turkeys vote for Christmas? New entrant strategies and coopetitive tensions in the emerging demand response industry

Interaction between Energy Incumbents and Solar Entrants: Relationship Status Complicated

“…Indeed, in the Swedish solar PV case, incumbent energy companies are very much involved in the downstream development and scaling up of the emerging niche innovation and have, in fact, been collaborating with new entrant solar firms to develop the turnkey solar business model for almost a decade (Lindahl et al, 2021;Wadin et al, 2017). Similar collaborative patterns have also been observed, for instance in Finland, both for solar PV and other energy-related technologies (Apajalahti et al, 2018;Heiskanen et al, 2018;Kangas et al, 2021;Ruggiero et al, 2021).…”

“…Articles on niche-to-regime interaction provide conceptual ideas and empirical studies of how niche innovations build links to regimes (e.g. Bui et al, 2016;Diaz et al, 2013;Elzen et al, 2012;Ingram, 2015;Smith and Raven, 2012) or manage tensions with regime actors (Kangas et al, 2021). Articles on regime-to-niche interaction focus on conceptualising the different ways in which regime actors may respond to the threat of emerging niche innovations (Turnheim and Sovacool, 2020) and provide examples of cases where regime actors have either blocked or reframed niches to suit their own interests (Smink et al, 2015a;Späth et al, 2016) or engaged with a new niche innovation through their technology or business strategies (Mylan et al, 2019;Smink et al, 2015b).…”

“…Technology-related interaction can concern competition or incompatibility between old and new technologies (Geels, 2018;Pekkarinen and Melkas, 2019), but may also involve less confrontational mechanisms, such as involvement of regime actors in the definition of key niche innovation characteristics (Elzen et al, 2012), mutual adaptations of technologies or organisational models to improve compatibility (Elzen et al, 2012;Pekkarinen and Melkas, 2019), or the integration of niche innovations into existing sociotechnical systems (Geels, 2018). The literature also describes how incumbent actors tend to have large and diverse sets of resources that can be applied to forming and accelerating niches, such as production capacity, customer bases, and legitimacy (Bui et al, 2016;Kangas et al, 2021;Turnheim and Sovacool, 2020;Wadin et al, 2017) which can complement the technical knowledge and innovation capabilities held by niche actors (Kangas et al, 2021;Wadin et al, 2017).…”

“…Institution-related interaction may, on the one hand, include struggles between niches and regimes in terms of conflicting problem framings or institutional logics (Geels, 2018;Ingram, 2015;Pekkarinen and Melkas, 2019;Smink et al, 2015a). On the other hand, the literature highlights that interaction may come in the form of alignment of visions and problem framings between niches and regimes, for example in the form of regime actors shaping transitions to suit their own purposes (Späth et al, 2016), niche and regime actors adapting or translating visions, problem framings and identities to fit better with the regime (Bui et al, 2016;Diaz et al, 2013;Elzen et al, 2012), or the development of shared visions (or other kind of new rules, including policy) across niche and regime actors (Bui et al, 2016;Elzen et al, 2012;Kangas et al, 2021;Yang et al, 2021).…”

“…Such conflicts are for the most part concretized as competitive tensions between new entrants (that build niches) and incumbent actors (that resist change) (e.g., Hess, 2016;Pekkarinen and Melkas, 2019;Smink et al, 2015aSmink et al, , 2015b. However, the balance between cooperation and competition can vary between cases (Kangas et al, 2021), and in cases such as ourswhich is characterized by a high degree of collaborationa one-sided focus on competition and conflict is clearly insufficient. Second, there is a lack of attention to the business side of niche-regime interaction.…”