An institutional logics perspective on the impact of global regimes on technological innovation systems: a case study of the industrial heat pump

Introduction
The Technological Innovation Systems (TIS) framework remains criticized for under-conceptualizing their context. The global regime concept, when combined with institutional logics, is particularly promising for understanding why technologies can emerge in one place, but cannot break through in the global market.
How institutional logics between local TIS and global regimes clash and creates barriers to the development and diffusion of emerging technologies, or create potential opportunities for innovation through novel recombination of logics, remains empirically understudied and conceptually under developed. This paper studies the impact of global industrial regime logics on the emerging TIS of the industrial heat pump (IHP) in the Netherlands, over the past 30 years.
Theoretical framework
The concept of Global Regimes proposes that dominant institutional logics are diffused at the global scale, as they are enacted and maintained by increasingly globally active actors. Places with cultural, institutional and material preconditions that support rationalities that deviate from that of the global regime, pose breeding grounds for new institutional structures (niches), as long as they remain relatively disconnected from global regime organizations and their isomorphic pressures.
It is here that TIS may emerge. However, as a TIS develops, the institutional mismatch between TIS and regime becomes increasingly apparent and problematic. This means that, local TIS-agents aiming to tap into regime resources, like markets or global supply chains, are expected to face substantial institutional barriers.
These institutional barriers to TIS development, are manifested by the different types of (coercive, mimetic and normative) isomorphic pressures exerted by the global regime. Dealing with these barriers requires effective institutional strategies by powerful TIS-builders.
In this paper, we identify the institutional logics that guide the behavior of TIS and global regime actors, and subsequently explore the coercive, normative and mimetic pressures these actors exert on TIS development in the Netherlands.
Methods
This research performed an explorative case study with a research design that comprises several, partly overlapping research steps, including structural-functional TIS-analysis; mapped out interrelated systems barriers; identifying the institutional logics and their changes in the Netherlands; assessing the relation between tensions between the institutional logics prominent in the global regime and in the Dutch TIS, paying special attention to the role of isomorphic pressures (coercive, mimetic, normative) global regime actors put on the Dutch IHP TIS.
Data came from a multitude of sources, including 40 interviews with various actors, notes of multistakeholder meeting and written (policy, company, newspaper, etc.) documents.
Results and conclusions
We find that semi-coherence of institutional logics may stimulate incremental innovation (i.e. through standardization and a low-cost focus, the heat pump is being adapted to the requirements of the dominant rationality in the global regime), but can stall transition. The heat pump would have been ‘ready’ to implement if the shift toward the capitalist logic on the demand-side had not happened. Thus: the speed of incremental innovation may be slower than the speed with which the dominant global regime is being institutionalized at local level, stalling the adoption of the new technology.
Following from the above, we find that semi-coherence is problematic when supply-side actors all adhere to a different logic than demand-side actors do, hampering the adoption of new technologies.
If instead some supply-side and demand-side actors adhere to the same alternative logic, a ‘niche’ is created for a technology that fits this logic. Different transition dynamics may result from vertical or horizontal semi-coherence.
Related to agency and power, institutionalization of a new logic can take place in rather short period due to coercive isomorphism in the form of take-overs and activist shareholders. Normative and mimetic pressures lead to much slower institutional change.