By Stuart Macdonald
page: 171 - 172
Prometheus: Critical Studies in Innovation
Volume 34, Issue 3-4
SKU: 0810-90281377996 |
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By Robert MacNeil
During its eight years in office, the Obama administration undertook an ambitious effort to transition the US economy towards the use of renewable energy technologies, and promote American leads in the global ‘cleantech’ industry. While many of the strategies selected to achieve these goals rendered positive results, others proved unproductive and/or politically toxic. Approaching the issue from a critical innovation framework (which focuses on the political and economic conditions under which the federal government is best able to promote technological change), this paper argues that the administration ignored some of the key conditions that have historically allowed Washington to succeed in promoting the uptake of new technologies. The paper describes the nature of these mistakes, and suggests an alternative way forward based on historical precedent.
page: 173 - 189
Prometheus: Critical Studies in Innovation
Volume 34, Issue 3-4
SKU: 0810-90281323746 |
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By Kean Birch
Infrastructure threatens to lock-in societies to fossil fuels unless something is done now. This is because infrastructure lasts for such a long time, meaning that any infrastructure built or rebuilt now will last well into the twenty-first century – until the end of the century, in some cases. Consequently, there is a need to integrate climate change into infrastructure now or societies will be left with infrastructure designed around unsustainable socio-technical systems (such as combustion engines, roads, and suburbanization). Such change is conceptualized in the literature as a sustainability transition. However, any attempts at such transitions have to address the ‘materialities’ of infrastructure systems (physical form, environmental context, and so on). In this paper, I develop the concept of ‘socio-material systems’ and apply it to transport infrastructure in Ontario, Canada.
page: 191 - 206
Prometheus: Critical Studies in Innovation
Volume 34, Issue 3-4
SKU: 0810-90281331612 |
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By Brian Rappert
‘Open data’ has recently emerged as a label for renewed attempts to promote scientific exchange. As part of such efforts, the posting of data online is often portrayed as commonly beneficial: individual scientists accrue greater prominence while at the same time fostering communal knowledge. Yet, how scientists in non-Western research settings assess such calls for openness has been the subject of little empirical study. Based on extended fieldwork with biochemistry laboratories in sub-Sahara Africa, this paper examines a variety of reasons why scientists opt for closure over openness with regard to their own data. We argue that the heterogeneity of research environments calls into question many of the presumptions made as part of open data. Inequalities in research environments can mean that moves towards sharing create binds and dilemmas. These observations suggest that those promoting openness must critically examine current research governance and funding systems that continue to perpetuate disparities. The paper proposes an innovative approach to facilitating openness: coupling the sharing of data with enabling scientists to redress their day-to-day research environment demands. Such a starting basis provides an alternative but vital link between the aspirations for science aired today as part of international discussions and the daily challenges of undertaking research in low-resourced environments.
page: 207 - 224
Prometheus: Critical Studies in Innovation
Volume 34, Issue 3-4
SKU: 0810-90281325142 |
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By Martin Wood
This commentary supplements the work of a creative practice research project that generates new ways of thinking about innovation and entrepreneurial processes. Our creative method, underwritten by the logic of sensation and presented in film format, operates as an alternative form of research in these fields, where results are normally conveyed in book or journal paper. Film-based research has developed distinctive qualitative, empirical and theoretical vocabularies that can expand the nature and range of evidence, argument and expression across the broad range of innovation and entrepreneurship studies. 600 Mills, the film that accompanies this paper, is available at
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page: 225 - 230
Prometheus: Critical Studies in Innovation
Volume 34, Issue 3-4
SKU: 0810-90281336011 |
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By G. M. Peter Swann
page: 231 - 249
Prometheus: Critical Studies in Innovation
Volume 34, Issue 3-4
SKU: 0810-90281339523 |
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By Nigel Holden
page: 251 - 254
Prometheus: Critical Studies in Innovation
Volume 34, Issue 3-4
SKU: 0810-90281339525 |
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By Richard Joseph
page: 255 - 257
Prometheus: Critical Studies in Innovation
Volume 34, Issue 3-4
SKU: 0810-90281355151 |
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By Margaret Thornton
page: 257 - 260
Prometheus: Critical Studies in Innovation
Volume 34, Issue 3-4
SKU: 0810-90281341676 |
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By William Kingston
page: 260 - 263
Prometheus: Critical Studies in Innovation
Volume 34, Issue 3-4
SKU: 0810-90281362820 |
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By Boru Douthwaite
page: 264 - 266
Prometheus: Critical Studies in Innovation
Volume 34, Issue 3-4
SKU: 0810-90281377995 |