A practioner's view on strategic niche management

Strategic Niche Management (SNM) is a tool to support the societal introduction of radical sustainable innovations. SNM attempt to tackle the following barriers to successful implementation of sustainable technologies: • Technological factors: the new technology lacks technical stability, does not perform sufficiently, or there is a lack of complementary technologies. • Government policy and regulatory framework: the new technology does not fit existing laws and regulations. • Cultural and psychological factors: the new technology does not fit user (or societal) preferences and values. • Demand factors: the new technology does not fit user demands (e.g. it is too expensive). • Production factors: the new technology does not fit firms’ expectations about what the user wants or the new technology is expected to compete with firms’ core products. Therefore firms are reluctant to invest to take the new technology into large scale production (and therefore does not profit from economies of scale). • Infrastructure and maintenance factors: there is not yet an infrastructure of maintenance network. • Undesirable societal and environmental effects: new technologies may solve problems but also introduce new ones.