Transformative Outcomes: Assessing and reorienting experimentation with transformative innovation policy

Abstract

The impending climate emergency, the commitments made in the Paris agreement and the UN Agenda 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) demand significant transformations in the present economies and societies. Science funders, innovation agencies and scholars have been exploring distinctive new rationales and processes for policy-making, such as transformative innovation policy(TIP). In this paper, we address the question of how to orient the efforts of science, technology and innovation (STI) agencies to enable transformations and address societal challenges. We developed a more consistent and robust approach for assessing the transformative outcomes which may be accomplished through experimental policy engagements. We build on sustainability transitions studies and on a four-year co-creation process carried out by the Transformative Innovation Policy Consortium (TIPC) and present twelve transformative outcomes that can guide the activities of STI agencies in evaluating and reformulating their current or new projects, programmes and policies. We illustrate the transformative outcomes in two empirical cases: transitions towards intelligent transport and mobility-as-a-service in the Finnish mobility system, and the emergence of speciality coffee in Colombia. Our analysis demonstrates that the twelve transformative outcomes can guide STI agents and other change-agents to fundamentally transform their ways of thinking and operation in the course of unlocking transformative change in society.