Laura Diaz Anadon, Assistant Professor in Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and Visiting Senior Lecturer in Science, Technology, Innovation and Public Policy at the Department of Science, Technology, Engineering and Public Policy at University College London, will present a public lecture on November 24 at the Graduate Institute in Geneva, Switzerland from 18:30 – 20:00.

This lecture, jointly hosted by the CIES at the Graduate Institute and the GGKP, will draw on recent interdisciplinary research to highlight new insights on the impacts of various policies on advancing energy innovation. Special emphasis will be placed on the growing experience from emerging economies and low-income countries in adopting new energy technologies. It will also suggest future research directions that could help to better inform ongoing national and international discussions on innovation in energy.

Q&A WITH LAURA DIAZ ANADON

1. What role can technological innovation play in moving society toward sustainable development?

Technological innovation can play a central goal to achieving all 17 of the Sustainable Development Goals agreed by the governments of 193 countries in September 2015.  Innovation is both its own goal (#9), and key to addressing all other goals in a cost-effective manner.  For example, innovation in agricultural technologies can mitigate hunger (goal 2) and protect ecosystems (goal 15); innovation in water technologies can increase the availability of water and sanitation for all (goal 6) while helping conserve marine resources (goal 14); and innovation in energy technologies has the potential to ensure access to affordable and reliable energy (goal 7), to mention a few.  At the same time, technology also has the potential for great harm, as we see with the case of fossil energy technologies and global warming, or with the case of using antimicrobial drugs, which can build resistance and render them ineffective. So technological innovation poses both great opportunities and challenges. 

2. What are the main challenges with respect to innovation in energy technologies?

As part of a project with over 30 multidisciplinary researchers that started 4 years ago, we came up with four key challenges common to harnessing technological innovation for sustainable development that are not specific to energy.

The first challenge is that technology innovation is a complex and non-linear process. It is complex in the sense that it does not only entail invention (or R&D) but it also entails experimentation in niche markets, adaptation, and widespread but also selection, adoption, adaptation and retirement. And it is non-linear in the sense that these processes are interlinked and widespread adoption can lead to insights that spur adaptation and further invention.  In practice this means that actors interested in utilizing innovation cannot limit themselves to one part of innovation.

The second challenge partly stems from the first one. The wide range of activities that contribute to innovation almost always result in a multiplicity of actors, often acting at various levels.  Actors may include final users, local governments, local and transnational firms, national governments, and international organizations.  This means that coordination of actors and activities is a major challenge, as has been observed in cases such as cookstoves to replace traditional biomass for 1.7 billion people.

The third challenge is that technologies are heterogeneous, so the partnerships, incentives and approaches that work to, for instance, residential solar panels are not the most appropriate for centralized power generation, for instance. In fact, our research has shown that there are often more commonalities between the processes that can support innovation in technologies across sectors than within sectors. To give an extreme and somewhat obvious example: a ceramic water filter is more similar to a cookstove than a carbon capture and storage plant in terms of the processes and mechanisms for moving from initial invention of these technologies through to widespread use. For this reason, its extremely valuable to learn across sectors and not only look at examples from energy for example.

And fourth, people in low-income countries and poor people more generally have a lower ability to pay and thus exert less market-pull and political influence to guide innovation to meet their needs.  This is a major problem in the context of sustainable development.

And to answer the question a little more specifically, I will also mention a challenge that may be more pressing in some parts of the energy sector.This more energy-specific challenge is that electricity or liquid fuels are commodities (unlike drugs that cure new diseases, for instance).  So for grid-connected  electricity, new technologies must compete with others that are not only creating  the same product, but also have multi-decadal lifetimes, and have a system of regulations and actors interested in preventing change. Moreover, the price of the incumbent technologies does not include the health and environmental costs it is imposing on society.  This presents an additional hurdle for some energy technologies.

3. Can you give us an example of a successful and of a non-successful adoption of energy technology by a developing country? 

This is a very difficult, and perhaps impossible question to answer.  Assessing success depends on the criteria used to measure success.

If by success one refers to the emergence of a local manufacturing industry that exports internationally, then the case of solar PV manufacturing in China would be successful.  Interestingly, it is a case in which the central government played a relatively minor role at the beginning, as Christian Binz and I are showing in current work. If one refers to being at the forefront of science and technology in that particular area or pollution caused by the manufacturing process, then it the case of solar PV in China may not (at least as of now) be such a success.

Similarly, the case of wind power in China and India shows the difficulty in talking about success without some qualification.

In a paper with Kavita Surana we show that India and China both started promoting wind power development and manufacturing in the mid-1980s, although with very different approaches. India relied more on the private sector and China on state-owned enterprises.  Depending on the metric that one uses, one could conclude that one, the other, both or none were more successful. Our research showed that there are tradeoffs related to the type of actors engaged in the promotion of an industry, the timing and magnitude of resources mobilized, and reliance on domestic versus foreign resources.

4. What additional research is needed to better enable energy innovation?

There is a breadth of experiences of policies or interventions across various sectors and technologies.  But to use these experiences there are several areas that still need investigation.

First, it is very hard to determine what one can learn or transfer without a common framework to help us understand the process of technology innovation and the characteristics that make different technologies and circumstances comparable.  In our project we developed a model and conceptual framework aimed at supporting such comparative analysis, but much more work is necessary to test and refine this framework.

Second, we know surprisingly little about the impact of various interventions within specific sectors and technologies.  For example, in the area of R&D investments, we know very little about the effectiveness of different type of mechanisms (grants, prizes, collaborative agreements, national labs) across different dimensions (fundamental discoveries and inventions, patents, spin-offs, publications, human capacity development, etc). Thus, program evaluation is an important area for future research.  There is emerging work even in the area of energy, including work by colleagues at the Kennedy School, but more is needed.

Third, even though we know from research that technology users cannot be an ‘afterthought’, we need to better understand what types of partnerships with what resources are more effective at meeting the most pressing needs on the ground. A subset of this gap is our poor understanding of how different actors can promote invention and adoption of energy technologies that address the needs in developing countries, instead of relying on adapting existing technologies. The reason for this ‘invention’ gap is of course related to the lack of market pull and to some extent empowerment, but it is an unresolved problem.

Fourth, through our multidisciplinary project we learnt about interventions that took place in health that were unknown to people in energy, and we discovered that some academic disciplines may have already done research in particular areas that other relevant disciplines or sectors may now know about. For example, behavioral economists has been active in energy, economists looking at intellectual property have been active in health. Innovation systems and historians scholars have looked at procurement in the case of defense and IT, etc.  Given the rewards posed on specialization, it is hard for scholars to know about all relevant literature. For practitioners the task is also daunting, without some way to digest the vast literature.

5. What can the policy community do about it?

The policy community can work as the bridge builder between the research community and the technology users.  Given the wide range of actors and activities required for innovation in a particular technology to take place, coordination is a crucial role. In our work we have seen that, depending on their resources, different policy organizations can act not just as the funders of initiatives, but (among other topics) also as conveners of various actors, as providers of legitimacy, and as partners in collaborative efforts, as providers of information (which includes putting to use the results of research) to reduce transaction costs, etc.

As we mentioned, there is little funding aimed at developing technologies to address specific needs in developing countries.  The policy community can also foster research along the lines mentioned above!  In summary, policy makers need to really grapple with how to re-orient innovation systems to better meet the needs of vulnerable populations including both the poor today and future generations who lack a voice in current innovation systems.

Energy Collective