Accelerating low carbon innovation: national institutions and effective organisation design

Accelerated clean electricity innovation is essential if global climate change targets are to be met by 2050. National innovation policy strategies are identified as key in delivering this, requiring policy makers to develop new approaches to technology funding and market development. At present, the role of politics in the emergence and implementation of innovation policy is not well understood by the innovation systems literature. There is therefore a gap in knowledge in relation to how national institutions shape the development of clean electricity innovation systems and how publicly funded organisations can be designed to accelerate innovation within them. This thesis addresses this gap by analysing how national institutions have affected the design of two publicly funded organisations for accelerated clean electricity innovation- the Energy Technologies Institute (ETI) in the UK and Advanced Research Projects Agency- Energy (ARPA-E) in the US. The thesis opens with a paper that refines a layered institutional framework, demonstrating the effect of multiple institutions on the development of the UK’s clean electricity innovation system 2000- 2018. The second paper builds on this system overview to introduce the case study of the ETI. The ETI’s operation is analysed through a refined framework of ten principles for accelerated innovation organisation design, which explore how the formation and operation of an organisation is affected by the broader institutional conditions introduced in paper one. Paper three further develops the ten principles via a comparative case study of the ETI and ARPA-E. The impact of different national institutional contexts on organisation design is discussed and generalisable approaches for accelerated innovation explored. This thesis offers two main theoretical contributions. Firstly, the refinement of a layered institutional framework for application to a sectoral innovation system, which brings new insights to understanding the role of institutions in shaping innovation system development. Secondly, the refinement and further development of ten principles for accelerated innovation organisation design, which contributes a theoretical link between national institutional conditions and how publicly funded organisations can be designed within this to implement innovation policy. This research also makes three key theoretical contributions. It consists of the first in-depth analysis of the role of institutions in the development of the UK clean electricity innovation system from 2000- 2018. It also provides the first academic analysis of the operation of the ETI, UK since the organisation ceased operation in 2017, adding a detailed study of a public-private partnership in a European setting to the growing literature on innovation organisation design. Finally, the thesis provides the first comparison of the operation of the ETI and ARPA-E, US, providing an international case study of two long-lived accelerated innovation organisations while taking into account the broader national innovation systems in which they have been developed. The policy contributions of the thesis include new insights into the need for policy makers to pay greater attention to institutional context when designing and implementing innovation policy and public organisations for accelerating low carbon innovation. More prescriptive recommendations are also made in relation to the way in which UK policy makers can learn from US clean energy innovation system development.