How transformative innovation policy leads to early lock-in for offshore wind

A new era of transformative and mission-oriented innovation policy has arisen due to the urgency of grand societal challenges, such as climate change. This new era requires a massive restructuring of societies, industries and consumption and will depend on, in part, new technologies and a high degree of coordination between the industry, civil society and government. These new forms of innovation policy may seriously alter classic innovation dynamics. Classically, promising technologies undergo an extensive formative phase – often more than 25 years before diffusion takes off. These classic innovation pathways stipulate that new technologies undergo a long phase of product development in which many different versions are tried and tested before a dominant design and industrial players emerge; this period of ferment is characterized by a high degree of technological experimentation, which is subsequently followed by convergence on a dominant design in which incremental innovation – i.e. improving the technology itself – and process innovation – i.e. streamlining production through scale-up, automation, etc., occurs. Technological variation at the beginning of a new innovation cycle plays a critical role in both technical experimentation – i.e. testing whether ideas are technically feasible – and social experimentation – i.e. evaluating market preference.
However, in the case of offshore wind, a specific institutional architecture has led to a rapidly formed dominant design that emerged very early in the technology’s development, thus reversing this classic innovation pathway. Radical experimentation, normally expected at the beginning of technological development, only began to emerge after 20 years of diffusion. The current design of offshore wind farms – based on a three-bladed, upwind turbine copied from its onshore counterpart and fixed on a monopile foundation, which is then hammered into the ocean-bed – is largely the same as on the majority of the original demonstration projects of the 1990s. Therefore, most innovation has gone into process innovation (more efficient installation processes, production manufacturing of monopiles, etc.) and incremental product innovation (increasing turbine size through longer blades and tower height, wider and longer monopile foundations, better digital software, etc.). Subsequently, radical innovations, such as floating foundations, gravity-based float-and-sink foundations and turbines designed explicitly for the offshore marine environment from the outset, are only emerging more than 20 years after the first demonstration farms.
This paper empirically demonstrates this reversed innovation trend and then proposes a new innovation dynamic founded in a new era of grand societal challenges. It then proceeds to illustrate how one country, The Netherlands, has promoted, embedded and participated in the rapid formation of a dominant design through an analysis of its offshore wind innovation system. It concludes that well-positioned incumbents and a specific innovation system architecture have created this trend, a notion applicable to a broader socio-technical system context. A rapidly formed dominant design and quick diffusion are critical to ensuring countries meet their climate pledges, but may risk early lock-in if there is no room for experimentation. We therefore propose that governments ensure sufficient attention to variety and experimentation in innovation systems while maintaining a focus on rapid diffusion.