Towards a conceptual model of uncertainty management for socio-technical innovations: A systematic review

Abstract

Socio-technical innovations are necessary to establish a transition towards sustainable infrastructural systems. Actors developing and implementing these innovations experience considerable uncertainty whether innovations will technically work, are beneficiary for societal goals and how other actors will behave during the innovation process. Such uncertainties hamper the (successful) introduction of innovations, as actors struggle with handling uncertainty. There is a research gap that explains how public and private actors make specific choices regarding uncertainty interactively. Therefore, this paper has systematically reviewed literature on the interactions of actors in uncertain innovation processes. In total fifty-three articles out 2909 have been included in the full review. Based on these articles, a conceptual model has been proposed how actors experience, respond to, and consequently make decisions under uncertainty, in a cyclical interaction process with other actors. This process is influenced by uncertainty competencies (actor-specific characteristics), as well as uncertainty settings (formal and informal governance rules). The conceptual model will inform further research on the role of uncertainty in multi-actor innovation processes, and how actor competencies and uncertainty settings can be improved to stimulate a sustainability transition by socio-technical innovations.