The motivation for this thesis stems from the widespread desire across various policy levels to accelerate the energy transition. While large established companies play a crucial role in this transition, owing to their substantial R&D capacity and their deep integration within socio-technical systems, this thesis focuses on young, agile companies. These emerging companies, have “little to lose”, can bear more risks and are flexible to easily penetrate specialized market niches. This thesis specifically examines innovative start-ups, with a particular emphasis on university spin-off companies.
The thesis investigates the determinants of innovative entrepreneurship and firm survival on the time required for market introduction and the longevity of spin-offs in the sustainable energy sector. The empirical analyses in this thesis draw on an original database of university spin-off companies, tracked retrospectively from 1998 to 2018. The spin-offs are founded in five countries: Denmark, Finland, and Sweden, chosen for their long-standing favourable national innovation systems (NIS), and the Netherlands and Norway, selected for their comparatively less favourable NIS and sustainable energy landscapes during part of the study period.
The data collection employed a mixed-method approach, incorporating face-to-face interviews, which, when possible, were conducted in two moments; first shortly after company formation and second interview was taken several years later. Data gathering was supplemented by telephone interviews and information from written sources such as company websites, university websites, investment consortia reports, and reports by sustainable energy organizations, and multi-level policy bodies. This time-intensive methodology ensures data reliability. The final dataset comprises 106 companies...
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Power generation is at the forefront of a transition from fossil fuel to renewable energy sources (RES). Wind energy is a promising technology with rapid developments and the installed base of wind turbines is continuously increasing. Currently, the majority of the installed wind turbines can be categorised under the direct drive wind turbine and the gearbox turbine. Both technologies have a substantial market share and the technological developments in this industry are advancing rapidly. At this stage, it is uncertain which technology will become the dominant design in the future. Therefore, both designs are analysed in this research by the application of the Best-Worst-Method, a type of Multi-Criteria-Decision-Making model. First, a list of factors for technology dominance is established for the technology battle between direct drive and gearbox wind turbines by conducting interviews with experts in the wind turbine market. The relevance of these factors is determined in a literature study. This results in a set of relevant factors that are ranked during a second round of interviews among four categories of experts in the wind turbine market. Furthermore, the experts will ranked the direct drive and gearbox technology with respect to the relevant factors for this specific case. This methodology is applied during three phases of the technology dominance process. Hereby is empirically determined if there is a change in the importance of factors and final technology score throughout the dominance process. This provides insight in which of both designs is most likely to become the dominant design in the future. During this study, a list of 8 relevant factors for the technology battle between direct drive and gearbox wind turbines has been established and two new factors are found. These factors and two technologies have been ranked in three phases of the dominance process resulting in a ranked list of factors and a final technology score. Based on this it is found that the importance of factors varies between the three phases of the dominance process. Furthermore, it is found that before the technology battle the gearbox wind turbine scored highest and that currently the transition from gearbox to direct drive wind turbines is going on. Our data proves that the direct drive wind turbine will win the technology battle and will become dominant. However, we also found that the wind turbine market cannot be considered as a “winner takes it all” market. Implying that the gearbox and direct drive wind turbine can coexist, where the direct drive is the dominant technology. In this study a new factor was found (rate of adoption) that allows both technologies to coexist. We suggest to further analyse the effects of this factor in future research to provide a body of cases to confirm the effect of the rate of adoption on coexistence. Furthermore, it is suggested to research the effect of policies with respect to the factors for technology dominance that have been found to speed up the adoption of wind turbines as a renewable energy source. Finally, we propose to construct a framework that provides an overview of which factors apply to which industry. This framework can serve as a valuable managing/ decision making tool.