Strategic niche management as an operational tool for sustainable innovation : guidelines for practice

Strategic Niche Management provides an evolutionary analytical framework that has proven useful for the analysis of success and failure in the introduction of radical innovations in fields such as wind energy, biomass, public transport systems and food production. However, SNM has yielded few detailed and practical "how to do it" guidelines for practitioners interested in how to incubate new technologies. This paper takes one step towards greater operationalisation of SNM as a practical tool for managing the development of radically new technologies. We consolidate the existing SNM studies to identify the main gaps in that literature. Then we bring in studies on the development and commercialisation of radical innovations in large companies and draw lessons from these with respect to "how to do" radical innovation, shedding new light on the nature of niche-based learning processes that are needed for these innovations to mature. A number of concrete guidelines for implementing the Strategic Niche Development approach are given.