Previous guest lectures and seminars

2022

Towards transformative investment? On the role of the financial sector in Net-zero transitions

Time and place: Dec. 6, 2022 2:00 PM – 4:00 PM, room 2512 LINKEN, Georg Sverdrups hus

Center for Technology, Innovation and Culture (TIK), University of Oslo, FME NTRANS and INTRANSIT invite to this seminar chaired by Allan Dahl Andersen, Associate Professor, TIK, UiO.

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) estimates that over the next 15 years an annual investment of $6.9 trillion in energy, transport, building and water systems is necessary to meet the requirements of a 2-degree scenario as set in the Paris Agreement. In addition, the goals of reaching net-zero emissions globally by mid-century imply that social and technological transformation must happen at unprecedented pace. In the face of such challenges, the financial sector (both public and private) plays a critical role in transforming our current sectors and systems in a direction that would contribute to the overall fight against climate change, environmental degradation, and social inequalities.

With this seminar we want to explore the following questions:

What is (or should be) the role of financial investment in the netzero transition?
What are currently the main barriers for the financial sector in supporting a rapid, net-zero transition (in Norway)?
What is the knowledge needs of the financial sector and how can social science energy transition scholars contribute?

There will be 10 min presentations by each speaker followed by about 30-40 minutes open discussion. Speakers include:

Johan Schot, Director of the Transformative Innovation Policy Consortium (TIPC), and Professor of Global History and Sustainability Transitions at the Utrecht Centre for Global Challenges, Utrecht University. He will talk about deep transitions and transformative investments, see below.
Eivind E.Olsen, CFO, Nysnø Climate Investments, Norwegian State climate investment company
Øyvind Leistad, Director Economics, ENOVA
Erik Ranberg, CIO, & Stian Fjellstad, ESG Analyst, Gjensidige (Insurance, Pension, and Investment)
Gunnar S. Eskeland, Professor of Resource and Environmental Economics at the Norwegian School of Economics (NHH). He can/will talk about SGE and asset creation in transitions
Roger Sørheim, Professor at Department of Industrial Economics and Technology Management, NTNU. He can/will talk about Corporate investment and cleantech

SPARK Social Innovation Educational Forum: Ethics and integrity in high-impact research

Time and place: Sep. 14, 2022 2:15 PM – 4:00 PM, Helga Engs Hus, U35

SPARK Social Innovation invites you to an open discussion on research ethics and integrity.

Researchers are increasingly expected to have an impact on society. For most researchers, societal impact has positive connotations. It is about contributing to making the world a better place. However, researchers are also capable of causing significant harm through unethical treatment of research subjects, creating harmful technologies, and engaging in fraudulent practices. These forms of negative impact are studied under headings such as research ethics and research integrity.

The fields of research ethics and integrity are evolving along with the research practices they study. As researchers are increasingly expected to have an impact, the salient ethical issues are changing. Where research ethics previously focused primarily on how researchers should treat their research subjects and what kinds of technologies are permissible, new developments treat researchers as actors in systems of innovation where they engage with various stakeholders and work towards openness and democratization of the research process, in order to cope with the fact that the distance between research organizations and the rest of society is shrinking. Integration with society also opens the door to external risks such as harassment or undue influence on the research process from external actors, which are problems that research organizations must introduce new measures to deal with.

This talk will address some of the issues that can arise regarding integrity and ethics in high-impact research, and will discuss measures that can counteract some of the risks involved when trying to bring research into society.

14:15: Welcome (Dennis Gan, SPARK Social Innovation)

14:20: Ethics and integrity in high-impact research (Knut Jørgen Vie, Postdoctor at the Centre for Technology, Innovation and Culture, University of Oslo)

May AI Revolution Be Labour-Friendly? Some Micro Evidence from the Supply Side

Time and place: Apr. 21, 2022 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM, Meeting room 302, Ullevål Stadion

Guest lecture by Professor Marco Vivarelli.

Professor Marco Vivarelli is Professor of Economics and Director of the Department of Economic Policy at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan.

Sustainable transition. The challenges of rapid transformative change

Time and place: Apr. 7, 2022 2:00 PM – 9:00 PM, HF 12, Niels Treschows hus

Seminar in honour of Professor Olav Wicken.

Approximately a decade ago, TIK launched its first research project in the emerging field of sustainable transition. Today this field is well established internationally, and TIK has a substantial group of researchers contributing to understanding changes toward sustainable production and consumption, i.e. how we can avoid the serious consequences of global heating.

We get regular reports on the urgency for more rapid reductions in climate emissions. However, we know from history that periods of transitions have been long-term, and that this is due to social, economic, and political – as well as technological - issues. May this be different for the ongoing transition?

Professor Olav Wicken has in these years been a central person to develop and foster this research at TIK. At the seminar we ask researchers that have contributed to this research at TIK to present perspectives and findings on ongoing change processes towards sustainability; and challenge them to reflect on and discuss conditions for a more rapid transformation.

Programme

Chair: Magnus Gulbrandsen

14:00: Welcome and introduction, Fulvio Castellacci and Olav Wicken
14:10: Session 1: Transforming energy systems
- Speed(bumps) in renewable energy transition, Jens Hanson
- Socio-technical tensions in rapid electrification on the road to net-zero by midcentury, Allan Dahl Andersen
- Transitions in established industries: An institutional perspective on greening of Norwegian oil and gas, Taran Thune
- Phasing out profitable industries, Håkon Endresen Normann
14:45: Panel discussion with speakers
15:30: Coffee break
16:00: Session 2: System Change for Sustainable Transition
- Car sharing for sustainable transportation, Elisabeth Svennevik
- Sustainable food production, Nhat Strøm-Andersen
- Potentials for a twin transition in waste management, Markus Bugge
16:30: Panel discussion with speakers
17:00: Food and greetings

2021

Innovation and social welfare: a new research agenda (webinar)

Time and place: Nov. 10, 2021 6:00 PM – 7:30 PM, Zoom

Fulvio Castellacci (director at TIK) speaks about his research on innovation and social welfare. The webinar is hosted by the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose, an institute founded and directed by Mariana Mazzucato.

The talk is based on Fulvio's working paper which outlines a new research agenda for investigating the impacts of innovation on individuals’ well-being and aggregate social welfare.

IIPP’s Antonio Andreoni will chair the talk, and Rainer Kattel (IIPP) will participate as a discussant.

TIK webinar with Professor James Wilsdon

Time and place: Apr. 8, 2021 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM, Zoom webinar

As part of our innovation lunch series, Professor James Wilsdon (The University of Sheffield) presents "Meta-science and meta-research: old wine in new bottles, or a cocktail for change?"

Across the world, engagement is intensifying in debates over how research is funded, practiced and evaluated, and in how research systems and cultures can become more robust, open, inclusive and impactful. A growing army of researchers, from diverse disciplinary and methodological starting points, are now grappling with these questions.

Alongside such work, fresh buzzwords have emerged or been recycled—such as 'meta-science', 'meta-research', 'science of science', and 'research on research’—often accompanied by hubristic claims to novelty or distinctiveness, while seeming disconnected or partially blind to decades of related work that have gone before, in fields such as STS, scientometrics, history and philosophy of science, research policy and innovation studies.

How should those of us based in more established fields respond to our new neighbours? Do we throw open our doors and start mixing the drinks, or add a few padlocks and reinforce the fences? Does the visibility and support (in some quarters) for more contemporary (re)framings reflect their blunter critical stance, or simply underline the failure of long-established approaches to win sufficient allies, resources and arguments?

Drawing on his own experience of 20 years as a science policy researcher, followed by 18 months as director of an unashamedly meta-scientific Research on Research Institute (RoRI), James Wilsdon will explore the tensions and possibilities of our own fields, old and new.

In resisting hype and what some see as “Columbusing” (the “discovery” of something long known), we must also remain alert to what Robert Merton dubbed the fallacy of “adumbration”—negating genuine novelty and advances by reference to an earlier trail of related findings.

Can we look beyond the labels, and remain open to genuine ways in which fundamental questions about research and innovation systems, the contexts in which they are being asked, and our capacity to answer them, are advancing? And where do we go from here?

Ass. Prof. Liliana Doganova (The Center for the Sociology of Innovation): What is a forest worth? The future as a temporal and political domain

Time: Mar. 10, 2021

On March 10 2021 Liliana Doganova visited the Science Studies Colloquium Series.

Drawing on a broader research project on the historical sociology of discounting, I will discuss different conceptions of the future that were brought to light by early attempts to determine the economic value of forests. Discounting is a technique that derives the value of an entity from the future flows of costs and revenues that it is likely to generate; it translates these future flows into present values by means of a number called the discount rate. Forests were one of the first non-financial assets to which this technique, which originated from finance and the idea that “one euro tomorrow is worth less than one euro today”, was applied. In forestry, discounting came as an answer to a twofold question: how much is forest worth, and at what age should trees be felled? I will analyse the debates to which these two questions, and the answer that discounting provided to them, gave rise in France and Germany in the 18th and the 19th centuries. I will show that forests were the arena of clashes between different conceptions of the future and the actors who carried them: the short-term future of rural populations who used the wood and fruits that forests offered them readily; the long-term future of the state which saw forests as a source of fiscal revenues and high-value timber; and, somewhere in between, the future of private owners who managed forests as a form of capital whose returns were to be maximized. I will conclude on the need to analyze the future not only as a temporal domain that has certain specificities related to the degree to which it lends itself to knowing, but also as a political domain over which some actors have the capacity to act while others do not.

Digitalization and users’ well-being (Webinar)

Time and place: Jan. 29, 2021 10:00 AM – 2:30 PM, Zoom webinar

The TIK Centre for Technology, Innovation and Culture invites you to a digital workshop on Digitalization and users’ well-being on Friday the 29th of January.

10:00 – 11:30: Internet use and subjective well-being

Fulvio Castellacci & Henrik Schwabe: “Internet use, aspirations and subjective well-being”.
Erik Carlquist, Katrina Røen & Lin Prøitz: “Social media, emotions and users’ well-being”.
Discussant: Joshua Phelps (Bjørknes University College & Norwegian Police University College)

13:00 – 14:30: Automation and job satisfaction

Henrik Schwabe & Fulvio Castellacci: “Automation, fear of replacement and job satisfaction”.
Adrian Smith & Cian O’Donovan: “Maker spaces, digital capabilities and well-being”.
Discussant: Ed Steinmuller (SPRU, University of Sussex)

The workshop is one of two workshops that mark the conclusion of TIK’s research project on “ICTs and well-being”. TIK also hosts a webinar on Digitalization, growth and international trade on the 28th of January.

Digitalization, growth and international trade (Webinar)

Time and place: Jan. 28, 2021 10:00 AM – 3:00 PM, Zoom webinar

The TIK Centre for Technology, Innovation and Culture invites you to a digital workshop on Digitalization, growth and international trade on Thursday the 28th of January.

10:00 - 12:00: ICTs, growth and income inequalities

Per Botolf Maurseth: “Internet and economic growth”.
Dibyendu Maiti: “ICT Exposure and well-being: A Cross Country Analysis”.
Artur Santoalha et al.: “Digital skills and income inequalities in European regions”.
Discussant: Chantale Tippett (NESTA, UK)

13:00 – 15:00: ICTs and international trade

Hildegunn Nordås: “Telecommunications, trade policy and services exports”.
Hege Medin & Per Botolf Maurseth: “Internet use, intermediaries and international trade”.
Arne Melchior: “ICT infrastructures and trade in Norwegian municipalities”.
Discussant: Biswajit Nag (Indian Institute of Foreign Trade)

The workshop is one of two workshops that mark the conclusion of TIK’s research project on “ICTs and well-being”. TIK also hosts a webinar on Digitalization and users’ well-being on the 29th of January.

2020

TIK Methods Lab: Taking care of the multi-sensual

Time and place: Feb. 20, 2020 2:00 PM – 3:30 PM, room 551, Eilert Sundts hus

Professor Lars Frers from the University of South-Eastern Norway will present his work on multi-sensory methods in social science and humanities.

Lars Frers will use the occasion to delve into the realm of the senses and how we can muster multi-sensory experience to address and take care of aspects of practice that often remain neglected – they are difficult to translate into text, they are challenging to get hold of in our research, they might come attached with a string of ethical uncertainties. All of this makes it difficult to open up and adapt our research approaches to the multisensory. At the same time, the rewards are manifold: we will get insights that often play into basic motivations, that are embedded into and form our and our research subjects’ affective relationship to the world around them, including both the human and the more-than-human. Listening, moving, touching – how we perceive is how we act and how we act is how we perceive.

Lars Frers is head of the PhD program in culture studies at the University of South-Eastern Norway. He has a doctoral degree from Darmstadt University of Technology, has been a guest researcher at TIK a decade ago, and was professor for qualitative methods at the Department of Sociology and Political Science at NTNU. He has published among other things on the topic of absence, and on resistance in public spaces. Mostly teaching courses on methods and history and philosophy of science, he is currently involved in research projects on failure in practice, and on child-animal relations.

Platform-Dependent Entrepreneurs: Power Asymmetries, Risks, and Strategies in the Platform Economy

Time and place: Feb. 4, 2020 10:15 AM – 11:30 AM, room 551, Eilert Sundts hus

Professor Martin Kenney, UC Davis will present his work on "Platform-Dependent Entrepreneurs: Power Asymmetries, Risks, and Strategies in the Platform Economy".

Online digital platforms organize and mediate an ever-increasing share of economic and societal activities. Moreover, the opportunities that platform-mediated markets offer not only attract enormous numbers of entrepreneurs, but also support the growth of entire ecosystems of producers, sellers, and specialized service providers.

The increased economic and business significance of digital platforms has attracted an outpouring of studies exploring their power dynamics and general impact. And yet, to date, this research has overlooked the power imbalance that entrepreneurs experience as members of the platform ecosystem, and provided little guidance on how these far more numerous firms should compete.

Drawing upon Emerson's power-dependence theory, we show that the power asymmetry at the heart of the relationship between the platform and its ecosystem members is intrinsic to the platform design, the technological architecture and the contractual agreements between the parties.

We undertake a conceptual analysis of the sources of this power, and we unravel the novel component of risks that emanate from this imbalance. Our analysis suggests that the conditions of engagement for platform entrepreneurs are so different from traditional entrepreneurship that these entrepreneurs are more usefully termed "platform-dependent entrepreneurs (PDEs).

Further, we explore the strategies that PDEs are developing to mitigate their dependence. Finally, our study provides a framework for policy makers that are considering regulating platform-organized markets.

2019

TIK Methods lab: Interdisciplinary document

Time and place: Dec. 5, 2019 12:00 PM – 2:00 PM, room 529, Eilert Sundts hus

We welcome you all to TIK's Methods Lab. Kristin Asdal and Hilde Reinertsen will present a manuscript-in-progress for a methods book on interdisciplinary document analysis.

TIK Methods Lab: From Spreadsheet to Network

Time and place: Nov. 21, 2019 2:00 PM – 3:30 PM, room 551, Eilert Sundts hus

PhD Fellow Frauke Rohden visits the TIK Methods Lab to present her ongoing work on the topic of digital ethnography and digital methods.

In Frauke's talk, she will go through a step-by-step example of collecting Twitter data, storing it in a spreadsheet, and visualizing it as a hashtag-user network with Gephi. She will show a couple of useful tools for dealing with this type of data, and talk about visual network analysis, relating to the work of Tommaso Venturini, amongst others. She will also discuss different ways of documenting the many steps of data processing.

TIK Methods Lab: Hélène Mialet

Time and place: Oct. 24, 2019 2:00 PM – 3:30 PM, room 551, Eilert Sundts hus

Hélène Mialet from the York University in Canada visits TIK Methods Lab with her talk Translating the body and the self through dogs and machines.

Authors' abstract

My presentation is based on an ethnographic study I am currently conducting in a California facility that trains dogs to recognize hypoglycemic episodes for people with Type 1 Diabetes. I follow how dogs' noses are transformed into 'reliable sensors' capable of alerting and giving feedback to human beings about the state of their bodies in situ-a specific form, I argue, of what we call the Quantified Self. I explore how these dogs are trained to manage 'the self' though the use of disciplinary methods, statistical methods (borrowed from the National Institute of Standards and Technology), and ethology. I show how dogs' behavioral and emotional reactions are constructed in relation with the environment they inhabit, and calibrated against numbers produced by machines (e.g., glucose meters) that are themselves used to calibrate the scent patches upon which the dogs' noses are trained.

If the facility I'm currently studying is adopting scientific methods and is run like a 'lab', it is also a non-profit organization based on the work of volunteers. It was created against the idea of making a financial profit (e.g., their dogs are given away at no charge); moreover, this organization offers something that they see as being neglected by the big corporations that design the machines that manage Type 1 diabetes: the 'love' of a dog, compassion, shared information, etc.

By following the creation of a management tool composed of a human, a dog and a machine-a symbiotic tool-I propose the emergence of a new definition of the self that doesn't stop at the boundary of the flesh. I argue that this distributed self could have practical implications about how we design machines and, at a theoretical level, about what kind of political system we could imagine.

Unlocking the green door of regional development: the role of MNEs in greening local inventive activities

Time and place: Aug. 27, 2019 11:00 AM – 12:30 PM, room 551, 5th floor, Eilert Sundts hus

Sandro Montresor visits TIK to discuss a recent paper on the extent to which MNEs contribute to the regional specialisation in green technologies.

Unlocking the green door of regional development: the role of MNEs in greening local inventive activities is a joint paper with Sandro Montresor, Davide Castellani, Giovanni Marin, and Antonello Zanfei.

Authors' abstract

Drawing on the literature about the environmental effects of MNEs, and combining it with recent research on the geography of eco-innovations and on the ‘greenness’ of international business, we maintain that the regional effect of inward FDIs should be greater in sectors where the scope for environmental spillovers on a focal green technology is the greatest. We also maintain that these spillovers mainly occur in R&D-related FDIs, and that FDIs attenuate the path-dependence that the green-tech regional specialisation is expected to show.

Combining the OECD-REGPAT and the Financial Times’ fDi Markets dataset with respect to about 1,000 European NUTS3 regions over the period 2003-2014, we find that the cognitive proximity between the domains in which FDIs and green-tech specialisations occur does even condition their relationship. On the other hand, the focal FDIs appear to have different qualitative effects on the proximate green specialisation, in terms of business activities they manifest through and of their reinforcing rather than switching previous regional specialisations.

Economic Development of the Soviet-Era Nuclear Test Site in Kazakhstan

Time and place: June 12, 2019 11:00 AM – 1:00 PM, room 648, Eilert Sundts hus

Dr. Magdalena Stawkowski visits the TIK centre and the Toxicity Reading Group to give a talk on the recent repurposing of the Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site in Kazakhstan.

This presentation explores the recent repurposing of the former Soviet-era Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site in Kazakhstan, from military zone, to highly productive resource landscape. Stawkowski examines the context for various post-Cold War economies that have taken off at Semipalatinsk and examine local, regional, and national governance regimes that are all rooted in varying interpretations of environmental history, scientific knowledge, and existing relationships of populations with radioactivity and corporate interests.

Kazakhstan inherited one of the world's most "disturbed" Cold War landscapes, polluted with residual radioactivity and heavy metals from nuclear testing. But Kazakhstan also inherited the vast steppe ranges, including Semipalatinsk, where rich deposits of coal, gold, copper, and other extractable ores can be easily harvested, with increasing development a priority. The contemporary situation exhibits a surprising lack of resistance to economic development of the territory by both local residents, national and non-governmental organizations, and global institutions.

Perhaps more surprising, and what I locate as key to understanding the contemporary situation, is the seeming solidarity between corporate interests and local populations all of whom are eager to make use of the radioactive landscape in spite of all that is known in other similar spatial configurations about the toxic politics that this alliance foresees.

Technological Diversification and Regional Resilience

Time and place: Feb. 7, 2019 1:15 PM – 2:30 PM, room 551, Eilert Sundts hus

TIK welcomes all our friends to a seminar on Technological Diversification and Regional Resilience by Ron Boschma.

Regional resilience is high on the scientific and policy agenda. An essential feature of resilience is diversifying into new activities. But, little is known about whether major economic crises accelerate or decelerate regional diversification, and whether the impact differs between specialised and diverse regions.

Today Ron Boschma will talk about an empirical paper on regional resilience that he recently completed. This paper offers systematic evidence on the effects of three of the largest crises in U.S. history (the Long Depression 1873-1879, the Great Depression 1929-1934, and the Oil Crisis 1973-1975) on the development of new technological capabilities within U.S. metropolitan areas. The study finds that crises reduce the pace of diversification in cities and that they narrow the scope of diversification to more closely related activities. Further, the findings show that more diverse cities outperform more specialised cities in diversifying during times of crisis, but more diverse cities do not have a stronger focus on less related diversification during these unsettled times.

Ron Boschma is Professor in Regional Economics at Utrecht University and Professor in Innovation Studies at the University of Stavanger. He has written prominent works in the fields of Evolutionary Economic Geography, Spatial Evolution of Industries, Geography of Innovation, Regional Growth, and Regional Diversification. Boschma was ranked by Thomson Reuters among the top 1% of cited researchers worldwide in 2014, 2015 and 2016. He is Editor of Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, and Associate Editor of Industrial and Corporate Change, Regional Science and Regional Studies.

2018

Transformative Innovation Policy: Transformation towards a bio-based economy and the development of smart cities

Time and place: Nov. 27, 2018 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM, room 551, Eilert Sundts hus

Lea Fuenfschilling presents the research project STIPP and discusses how it relates to sustainability transition research. This work initially focuses on two transition areas that are currently of high strategic importance in Sweden, in Norway and internationally: the transformation towards a bio-based economy and the development of smart cities. The overall aim of The Swedish Transformative Innovation Policy Platform (STIPP) is to advance our understanding of the dynamics and governance of challenge-driven transformation processes, and to develop a more comprehensive framework for transformative innovation policy.

In this presentation Lea Fuenfschilling links this project to recent discussions and development of the sustainably transition field. With this, she presents some of the main objectives of the platform:

to develop a more substantiated analytical framework for transformative innovation policy
to advance knowledge on the particularities of systemic, socio-technical innovation and change processes
to investigate the nature and effect of current policies targeting system innovation and to identify successful practices, limitations and challenges of the current set-up, particularly in the area of the bio-economy and smart cities

STIPP is funded by Vinnova and will initially run 2018-2022.

The Food of our Food: Medicated Feed and the Industrialization of Metabolism

Time and place: Oct. 30, 2018 4:00 PM – 6:00 PM, room 551, Eilert Sundts hus

Professor Hannah Landecker is visiting TIK on Tuesday the 30th of October, and she will be presenting the paper "The Food of our Food: Medicated Feed and the Industrialization of Metabolism".

The paper recounts the history of medicated feed for agricultural animals in the twentieth century United States. While there has been some appreciation of the addition of antibiotics and hormones to feed as growth promoters, given worries about these as adulterations of the end-product that is milk and meat for human consumption, the systematic remaking of animal feed since the turn of the twentieth century has gone underappreciated. This paper traces the science of the “animal as converter,” with metabolism and feed efficiency as work objects in the effort to make more with less. Vitamins, minerals, amino acids, fungal enzymes, short chain fatty acids, arsenical medicines, anti-oxidants, and many other substances are part of this story, many of which were also then used in human food fortification and engineering. As a result of the focus on feed efficiency in the science-industrial effort to promote growth, what we know about many of these elements is confined to how they affect growth, a positive knowledge that has obscured the many other questions one might ask about how these nutritional components affect animals, microbiota, environments, and humans. This paper argues that a more systematic history of agricultural feeding points not toward the industrialization of discrete foodstuffs or activities (cows, farming), but toward the industrialization of metabolism. In this history one can see how the metabolic inter-conversions of different bodies were rearticulated in the name of feed efficiency, establishing new flows of matter and energy through microbes, animals, plants and humans.

Benjamin Sovacool: Ordering Theories: Typologies and Conceptual Frameworks for Socio-Technical Change and Energy Transitions

Time and place: Oct. 2, 2018 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM, room 551, Eilert Sundts hus

What theories or concepts are most useful at explaining technological change? How can - or cannot - these be integrated? To provide an answer, this presentation summarizes the results from 35 semi-structured research interviews with social science experts who also shared more than two hundred articles, reports, and books on the topic of the adoption, use, or diffusion of technology. This material led to the identification of 96 theories and conceptual approaches spanning 22 self-identified disciplines. The presentation begins by explaining its research terms and methods before honing in on a combination of 14 theoretical concepts deemed most relevant and useful by the material. It then places these theories into distinct taxonomies and typologies. Theories can be placed into five general categories of being agency-centered, structure-centered, discourse-centered, relations-centered, and justice-centered. They can also be classified as based on the interpretivist, functionalist, strucutralist, and humanist assumptions behind theories. This presentation lays out tips for research methodology before concluding with insights about technology itself, analytical processes associated with technology, and the framing and communication of results.

The next decade of transition studies - Emerging themes around energy

Time and place: June 4, 2018 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM, room 551, Eilert Sundts hus

Dr. Jochen Markard will hold a talk reflecting on the emerging research topics in the field of energy transition studies.

Energy sectors are changing fundamentally in many places around the world. Among others, this transition is driven by the ambition to combat climate change. A key element of the ongoing energy transition is the expansion of new renewable energy sources such as wind, solar or biomass, partly substituting electricity from fossil or nuclear fuels. With an increasing decarbonization of electricity and rapid advances in battery technology, it also becomes more attractive to use electricity in transport. At the same time, information and communication technologies become ever more powerful and pervasive, thereby also affecting ongoing transitions.

Sustainability transition studies is an emerging and rapidly growing field of research addressing fundamental and long-term changes in existing sectors. It brings together researchers from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds who share an ambition to study and contribute to sustainable transformations. Transition studies are based on systems approaches to innovation that highlight the interrelatedness of technological, organizational, institutional, and socio-political change.

This talk offers reflections about emerging research topics in the field of energy transition studies. Markard will argue that the energy transition is a particularly interesting topic for research, policy and organizational strategy because it is a sustainability transition that has entered the next stage of development. This new phase is characterized by an accelerated diffusion of innovation, the interaction of multiple technologies, industry decline, increasing struggles over policies and transition pathways, and interaction with adjacent sectors such as transport or ICT. Many of these phenomena are complex and very challenging for policy making and research. As innovation scholars, we not only have the opportunity to study sustainability transitions on a real-time basis but also to co-develop and shape the frameworks and tools needed for that.

Is green growth possible? On the coming transformation to a post-fossil society

Time and place: Apr. 13, 2018 11:45 AM – 12:30 PM, room 551, Eilert Sundts hus

In this seminar, Professor Staffan Laestadius will discuss whether the magnitude of the transformation ahead - if the Paris targets to limit temperature increases to 2°C (1.5°C) are taken seriously – can be combined with (green) economic growth. The visions of a zero (negative) growth transformation to sustainability seem to be lacking among politicians as well as economists.

The presentation is based on a (at the time of the seminar) recently published book in Swedish.

Energy Informatics and the evolving energy sector

Time and place: Mar. 19, 2018 11:45 AM – 12:30 PM, room 551, Eilert Sundts hus

Energy Informatics is a new university initiative promoted by UiO:Energy and associated with the Department of Informatics. The main goal is to tackle the future global warming, energy crisis and climate change challenges by exploring state-of-the-art ICT (Information & Communications Technology) theories and tools to address energy-related problems.

In this talk, Professor Yan Zhang (MN, UiO) will first introduce the key concepts and vision in Energy Informatics.

Then, focus on one of the main challenges: how sharing economy may transform the energy sector. He will mainly explain this from three perspectives: the Internet Peer-to-Peer (P2P) principle, blockchain, and game theory.

Finally, he will briefly introduce the new course INF5870/INF9870 Energy Informatics.

Digitalization in the oil and gas industry

Time and place: Feb. 20, 2018 11:45 AM – 12:30 PM, room 551, Eilert Sundts hus

The SIRIUS SFI at the Department of Informatics lies at the intersection “new oil” and “old oil”, where informatics meets the oil industry.The centre attempts to set a research-based innovation agenda for its member companies, which include Statoil, Schlumberger, DNV GL, IBM and SAP.

This talk will explain what SIRIUS does and how we hope to address the challenges of industrial digitalization in and beyond the oil and gas industry.

Media Resistance: Protest, Dislike, Abstention

Time and place: Feb. 1, 2018 1:45 PM – 2:30 PM, room 551, Eilert Sundts hus

In her new book Media Resistance: Protest, Dislike, Abstention Trine Syvertsen discusses reactions and protests against mass media, TV and online media sources. The book puts opposition towards media and technology in a historical perspective and discusses the transition from political protests to self-regulation.

2017

The politics of low carbon innovation. Lessons from six case studies

Time and place: Mar. 8, 2017 2:30 PM – 3:45 PM, room 551, Eilert Sundts hus

Florian Kern from SPRU will give a talk about the issue of the “protective space” for niche innovations. During his talk he’ll draw on 6 low carbon innovation case studies from the UK and Netherlands.

In the sustainability transitions literature the idea of ‘protective space’ shielding niche innovations from unfriendly selection environments is a fundamental concept. Few studies pause to consider how and by whom such protective space is created, maintained or expanded. The presentation develops three propositions to deepen our understanding of the ‘outward-oriented socio-political work’ performed by technology advocates. The presentation will illustrate the findings of our project on the politics of low carbon innovation with material from six low-carbon technology case studies conducted in the UK and The Netherlands (solar PV, offshore wind, CCS).

Seminar with Tomas Kåberger - EU's bioeconomy strategy: Conflicts and prospects ahead

Time and place: Mar. 14, 2017 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM, room 450, Eilert Sundts hus

FNI, NIFU and TIK invite to a seminar on the EU Bioeconomy Strategy and EU biofuels policies. How have these policies developed over time? Who are the main policy actors and what are the main conflicts and challenges ahead? How do these EU policies play into the Norwegian Government’s recently adopted Bioeconomy Strategy?

Tomas Kåberger is professor in Energy and Environment at Chalmers Unviersity.

MNC Experimentalism and Upgrading in China

Time and place: Mar. 21, 2017 1:15 PM – 3:00 PM, room 529, Eilert Sundts hus

Professor Gary Herrigel from the University of Chicago will talk about the process of Chinese manufacturing upgrading and how this process, a historical success, has involved a transformation and industrial learning Dynamics.

Gary Herrigel is the Paul Klapper Professor in the College and Division of Social Sciences at the University of Chicago. He is a member of both the Political Science (primary) and the Sociology (courtesy) departments. Herrigel has published widely on industrial change in Europe, the United States, Japan and China combining nuanced historical analysis and deep familiarity with social theory with detailed interview based qualitative research on contemporary developments in manufacturing.

Herrigels academic publications have been widely cited and he has consistently engaged on a practical level in public debates on industrial change and business strategy in the United States and Europe. His main area of concentration in Europe has been Germany, where he has maintained a twenty year long collaboration with the SOFI Institute in Göttingen.

He has also published on changes in the Norwegian regulatory system. He is a permanent Visiting Professor in the Sociology Department at the Georg-August Universität Göttingen and has held visiting fellowships at MIT, the Copenhagen Business School, the Universität Heidelberg, and NHH (Norwegian School of Economics).

The long and winding road: Building Brazilian innovation policy

Time and place: May 23, 2017 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM, room 551, Eilert Sundts hus

Professor Antonio Botelho will give a talk about Brazilian innovation policy at the TIK centre on May 23rd.

Antonio Botelho is Professor and Head of the Graduate Program in Political Sociology, Instituto Universitário de Pesquisas do Rio de Janeiro-IUPERJ / Universidade Candido Mendes-UCAM, Brazil.

Workshop: Health by the Algorithm

Time and place: Mar. 24, 2017 9:00 AM – 3:00 PM, room 551, Eilert Sundts hus

This open workshop is an accompaniment to the seminar Self tracking - good for you?, held on March 23rd 2017.

This workshop is funded through the project “Epidemiological Risk Scores as Knowledge Transfer Devices”, supported by BMBF, Germany.

Organizers: Susanne Bauer, TIK Centre and Christine Holmberg, Charité University Medicine

Programme

09:00: Multifaceted accountability: Study nurses between care for data and care for probands.
- Speaker: Ute Kalender (Charité University Medicine). Discussants: Jeannette Pols (University of Amsterdam) and Tone Druglitrø (TIK Centre).
09.45: Coffee/Tea
10.00: Following the algorithm. Epidemiological risk scores as accounting Devices
- Speaker: Katrin Amelang (University of Bremen). Discussants: Francis Lee (Uppsala University) and Margunn Aanestad (University of Oslo)
11.00: Where is zika? Exploring the ambiguities of algorithms, data and judgment
- Speaker: Francis Lee (Uppsala University).
12.00: Lunch
13:00: Health by the Algorithm – where do we go from there? | Exploring Data Infrastructures, Systems Medicine and Public Health
- Speakers: Susanne Bauer (TIK, Oslo) and Christine Holmberg (Charité University Medicine, Berlin).

Self tracking - good for you?

Time and place: Mar. 23, 2017 1:00 PM – 3:00 PM, room 551, Eilert Sundts hus

Do e-health apps and self tracking lead to better health? This seminar tackles the ethical concerns of using such apps and devices.

Professor Jeanette Pols (University of Amsterdam) will visit UiO to talk about e-Health and selv tracking apps, and the ethical concerns of implementing these in the Netherlands.

In June 2014, the Dutch minister of health notified the parliament about her intentions to stimulate the use of e-health in the Dutch population. One of the targets of her policy is to have 75% of the elderly and chronically diseased population – if they want and are able to - use e-health apps in 2019, specifically self tracking devices.

The idea behind this ambitious aim was that self tracking will lead to the prevention of disease and better health for its users. This stems from a global optimism about statistics that show how smoking, low exercise and bad eating lead to more than half the health care costs through the prevention of chronic diseases, while these ‘lifestyle diseases’ can be prevented. Lifestyles can be changed, is the idea, and the route to this change is sought in the individuals changing their lifestyle by managing their lives better.

The idea is that this is also what they want. Who wants to suffer from debilitating chronic diseases? A related assumpution is that if there is a ‘will’ to change one’s lifestyle, this good reason for optimism. This is assumed to provide a solid agency, to form a motivating drive to actually put one’s lifestyle in accordance with one’s goals and decisions.

In this presentation I will explore the ethical concerns with the Dutch health minister’s suggestion. A clear problem is for instance the collection and selling of data people ‘sweat together’, without them knowing this or being able to influence it. But there are also questions about the inscribed users of these apps. How do they make people look at themselves and their health differently? How do measurements (quantified self) relate to experiences (qualified self)? Can measurements do harm? What is the ethico-psychological position of the self-tracker?

Human agency in post-automation

Time and place: Sep. 6, 2017 11:00 AM – 1:00 PM, room 551, Eilert Sundts hus

Professor Adrian Smith and Dr. Cian O'Donovan from the University of Sussex, SPRU, will give a talk on the appropriation of digital design and fabrication technologies in non-industrial settings at the TIK centre on September 6th.

Contrary to much analysis and commentary, automating technologies do not arise autonomously of society, but result from sociotechnical choices amongst actors in those societies. Our research aims to develop a social theory of post-automation, grounded in this reality, and that focuses upon human agency in pursuit of sustainable developments.

Human agency is taken, for now, to be evident when individuals or collectives are able to independently appraise a (structured) situation and act autonomously within it, and including an ability to change the situation to some degree. Digital design and fabrication technologies, and their non-industrial use in community settings such as hackerspaces and makerspaces are sites where appropriations of hitherto ‘automating’ technologies may take place in ways never imagined by the original designers. These workshops offer a site for new empirical research. Enthusiasts celebrate a widening appropriation of tools such CAD/CAM, 3D printers, laser cutters and routers.

Yet it is curious how computer-controlled technologies that deskilled and damaged manufacturing worker communities in the past, are now celebrated as providing new skills and users with new capacities for human development. Perhaps the real picture is somewhat ambiguous and ambivalent?

On the political vernaculars of value creation

Time and place: Sep. 22, 2017 3:15 PM – 4:15 PM, room 551, Eilert Sundts hus

Fabian Muniesa, from the Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation, Ecole des Mines de Paris, will give a talk on the political vernaculars of value creation at the TIK Centre on September 22nd.

Of the many ideas that control economic reasoning and the policies that go with it, that of 'value creation' is certainly a most intriguing one. Something called 'value' is assumed to be 'created' and this essentially virtuous process is supposed to guide not only economic conduct but the orientation of the transformation of the world altogether.

What are the assumptions that lie beneath that notion? What is the worldview that is required in order for it to make sense? Considering 'value creation' as both a moral horizon and a political technology means examining the rhetorical role of the 'investor' in the conduct of political life and the particular blend of eschatological disinhibition that it prompts.

Biomimetics and Bioeconomy

Time and place: Oct. 26, 2017 1:15 PM – 2:15 PM, room 551, Eilert Sundts hus

Prof. Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent - [broken link] from the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, will give a talk on biomimetics and the bioeconomy at the TIK Centre on October 26th.

Biomimicry is sometimes presented as a revolution that opens up a new era of nature-friendly and sustainable technological development.

However looking at the major trends of biomimetic practices in Converging Technologies at the nanoscale (often referred to as NBIC for as Nano-Bio-Info-Cognitive science) where biology and technology become more and more intertwined, such claims of reconciliation between nature and technology have to be critically examined.

There is no evidence of a strong link between past or present practices of biomimetic design and the environmental culture.

Performing market models – re-performing society

Time and place: Dec. 14, 2017 2:30 PM – 3:30 PM, Room 551, Eilert Sundts hus

Peter Karnøe, from the Department of Planning and Development, Aalborg University, will give a talk on competing electricity market designs and implications for governance and agency at the TIK Centre on December 14th.

Electricity systems are seldom coherent and smoothly performing entities. Their system building activities stem from assembling heterogeneous entities, and tends to be rife with endogenous contradiction and exogenous tensions.

The Danish energy system transition is, like other countries linked to the Nordpool electricity market, faced with a problematic situation of ‘missing money for investments’ due to issues of overcapacity, subsidy schemes, low carbon prices and merit-order effects, while needing the investments to decarbonize the energy system, to meet the political goal of making a low-carbon society by 2050. The prices made from the current electricity market designs can make a competitive allocation of electricity generation, but they are surprisingly inadequate in securing prices for the necessary investments in capacity and decarbonization (plus storage, energy savings, sector integration and electrification, etc.).

Strangely, the new collective problems are linked to the reforms making the markets, and the decarbonization reforms linked to climate change policies. The decarbonization reforms subsidized wind power and the zero-marginal cost technologies created the merit-order effect that lowered the electricity prices. And now the electricity markets must be reformed in order to serve the new technology mix and make prices that are also incentivizing investments.

This talk argues that electricity market arrangements must be seen as always incomplete and partial governance instruments, that renders some tensions and contradictions visible and governable while ignoring others. With this in mind different electricity market models are discussed in relation to their wider implications for generating concerns and policy objects for electricity and energy system governance.

2016

Seminar: Valuography as a new way to (re-)visit the lab as well as the restaurant?

Time and place: Jan. 13, 2016 1:00 PM – 3:00 PM, Room 551, Eilert Sundts hus

Professor Claes-Fredrik Helgesson will talk about valuography, a programme of empirically oriented research into the enacting, ordering, and displacing of values.

In a recent edited collection he an his co-editors proposed the notion of valuography to "indicate a programme of empirically oriented research into the enacting, ordering, and displacing of values".

Following a pragmatist understanding of values and valuations from John Dewey and Fabian Muniesa and others, a valuographic research programme is inclined to examine how and with what means some aspects come to count as important values, some comes to be considered as opposing one another, and still others come to be discounted.

The talk further elaborates what a valuographic research programme might entail and gives examples from two ongoing research projects: one about the valuations in clinical trial design for drug development and another about the splitting of restaurant bills.

TIK seminar: The 9/11-effect on engineering research

Time and place: Mar. 14, 2016 1:15 PM, room 450, Eilert Sundts hus

Professor Mats Fridlund will talk about how terrorism has shaped engineering research, more specifically on the existence of a ‘9/11-effect’ on Research.

The presentation is a beginning towards a history of science and technology of the 21st century ‘War on Terrorism’ through a study of how terrorism has shaped engineering research. In this it builds upon research within history of science and technology that since the 1990s has devoted an increasing interest to the effect of the Cold War on engineering research.

The presentation is based on the paper which extends and deepens our previous research that demonstrated the existence of a ‘9/11-effect’ on research in general by providing quantitative estimates and qualitative examples of how research in the engineering sciences during 1989-2013 have shifted towards increasingly addressing issues related to terrorism.

Our study used close and distant reading of published scientific articles identified in Thomson Reuters Science Citation Index and the Conference Proceedings Citation Index of about almost 2.000 items within the research area of ‘Engineering’. The resulting quantitative bibliometric visualizations are used for close readings to elucidate the qualitative historical effects of the 9/11-effect on engineering research.

TIK seminar: Proposals for new incentives and reward models for stimulating antibiotics innovation

Time and place: Apr. 13, 2016 1:15 PM – 3:00 PM, room 551, Eilert Sundts hus

Jens Plahte, Senior Advisor at the International Department at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health (Folkehelseinstituttet) and also a former Research Fellow at the TIK-Centre, will provide a brief introduction to the problem of antibiotic resistance and explain the challenges encountered in antibiotics innovation.

Dangerous bacteria are becoming resistant to antibiotics faster than new antibiotics are being developed to stop them. Since the late 1980's there has been a lack of innovation of novel antibiotics.

For instance, in 1980, there were more than 25 pharmaceutical companies with active antibacterial drug discovery programs; today only four pharmaceutical companies invest in antibiotic-related research and development.

Recently, several national and international initiatives have been set up to address the issue, most notably the UK Review on Antimicrobial Resistance (the AMR Review), which has already issued several reports on different aspects of the antimicrobial resistance challenge.

TIK seminar: Satisfied callers: police, corporations, and documentation in India

Time and place: Apr. 28, 2016 2:15 PM – 4:00 PM, room 551, Eilert Sundts hus

Matthew Hull will talk about how a disjunct arrangement of the Indian state hiring a private corporation to run a call center to take emergency calls to the police, appears to be reshaping lines of authority and police practice.

State organizations are infamous for insatiable appetites for documentation, but sometimes they refuse to produce documents. In India, police officers often refuse to register complaints and initiate proceedings.

A recent project by the police in the Indian state of Punjab has aimed to eliminate this practice. The state hired a private corporation to run a call center to take emergency calls to the police.

Young, middle-class, educated women staff the phones and act as case coordinators, dispatching police in locations across the state and monitoring the progress of cases through an elaborate database that logs communications from victims and police documents.

Procedures embedded in corporation software translates the government procedure into the language of customer service. This disjunct arrangement appears to be reshaping lines of authority and police practice.

TIK Seminar: Internationalisation of small and medium sized companies: The Australian Experience.

Time and place: June 1, 2016 1:15 PM – 3:00 PM, room 551, Eilert Sundts hus

John Dean from the University of Wollongong, Australia, will hold a seminar at TIK 1 June, at 13.15.

John will talk about his research on the supply industry for mining sector in Australia (particularly interested in internationalisation); a set of companies quite similar to - and successful as - the supply industry of oil and gas in Norway.

TIK-Seminar: Making Traditional Knowledge Matter: Environmental Contamination, Indigenous Health, and Oil Production in Canada

Time and place: Nov. 2, 2016 1:15 PM – 3:00 PM, room 551, Eilert Sundts hus

Dr Sarah Blacker will talk about how collaborative studies can enable the public to identify matters of concern and to participate in the research process in the case of contamination affecting Indigenous First Nations communities located near an oil extraction site in Canada.

Engaging with decolonizing methodologies in STS, as well as non-Western and Indigenous approaches to the study of science and technology, this talk raises questions about public participation in science, shifting concepts of expertise, and the making of scientific data. Examining both the possibilities opened up by, and obstacles to, collaborative studies that aim to produce ‘hybrid’ data that reflect knowledges often seen as incommensurable with Western science, I will discuss how levels of contamination affecting Indigenous First Nations communities located near an oil extraction site in Canada have been measured. This industrial site has been extracting bitumen from a geographical area larger than 79,000 km2 since 1967, yet the scientific knowledge produced about the health and environmental effects of this industry in the last years has been largely industry-sponsored and has not allocated epistemic space for Indigenous Traditional Knowledge about the consequences of industrial contamination for animals, plants, soil, waterways, and human health.

A collaborative research project between scientists and First Nations communities in Canada was designed to render Traditional Knowledge concerning harm caused by industrial pollution into forms of evidence that will be recognized by government metrics. I consider the processes of translation and encoding that quantify Traditional Knowledge for visibility within dominant Western scientific practices. Directly addressing the colonial relations at this site, the talk focuses on how such collaborative studies can enable the public to identify matters of concern and to participate not only in the making of data, but in the study design, interpretation, publication, and circulation of study results.

TIK-Seminar: Changing paradigms - Making the transition towards a bio-based economy possible

Time and place: Nov. 8, 2016 1:15 PM – 3:00 PM, room 830, Eilert Sundts hus

Professor Piergiuseppe Morone will talk about transitioning to a bio-based economy which involves more than just technological changes, but also big societal and institutional changes as much as the development of radically new technologies.

Significant changes are ahead of us: most notably, the world’s population is projected to increase by almost one billion people within the next decade and the global middle class is expected to nearly triple by 2030. These trends add pressure to the world economic system and environment: greenhouse gas emissions keep growing at global scale, materials and energy sources are fast approaching their physical limits, and the amount of waste produced under the current system seems to be reaching a new peak.

Against this background, a transition from a society heavily based on mass consumption, uncontrolled waste generation, and heavy fossil-fuels exploitation toward one based on resource-efficiency, new production and consumption behaviours, waste reduction, reuse, and valorization, seems a desirable and much-needed feat. This change involves a paradigm shift, which goes beyond technological change – it involves big societal and institutional changes as much as the development of radically new technologies and would give rise, in a long-term perspective, to the beginning of a new long wave of sustained (and sustainable) growth.

TIK-Seminar: Emancipating Transformations: from Anthropocene control to democratic care for the Earth

Time and place: Nov. 30, 2016 1:15 PM – 3:00 PM, room 551, Eilert Sundts hus

Global environment policy reverberates with increasingly ambitious aims to ‘take control’ of planetary systems. Democracy is portrayed as a 'failure', a 'luxury', or 'an enemy of nature', which must be 'put on hold'. Familiar rhetorics of incumbency insist there is ‘no alternative’ to compliance, other than irrational denial and existential doom.

Yet it can be recognised from the history of ‘Sustainability’ and wider issues, that emancipatory struggle is typically main means by which to achieve ambitiously progressive transformation. In this view, concentrated power and fallacies of control are actually more problems than solutions. This talk will explore some of the key – rather important – implications.

2015

TIK-seminar: Social Innovation Futures – Beyond policy panacea and conceptual ambiguity

Time and place: Jan. 14, 2015 1:15 PM – 2:30 PM, room 551, Eilert Sundts hus

Can small-scale social experiments lead to the solution of pressing societal problems? The first TIK Seminar of 2015 will explore the processes of social innovation - and what they might lack.

Ultimately, innovation studies could promote solutions to the so-called Grand Challenges:

Health, demographic change and wellbeing;
Food security, sustainable agriculture, marine and maritime research and the bio-economy;
Secure, clean and efficient energy;
Smart, green and integrated transport;
Climate action, resource efficiency and raw materials;
Inclusive, innovative and secure societies.

Can social innovation solve the Grand Challenges?

Kuhlman and Rip 's recent report for the European Research Area Innovation board on "The Challenge of addressing Grand Challenges" has highlighted the policy imperatives around ensuring that research policy supports and stimulates innovation activity. At the same time, there is a growing interest in the potential of social innovation phenomena to contribute to addressing these Grand Challenges, particularly in resolving the thorny multi-disciplinary human dimension of many of these issues. But this common-sense idea of social innovation is based on a quasi-concept, where processes of innovation are absent. To restore some academic rigour to this important concept, we argue more attention need be paid to these innovation processes in social innovation, and that there is value in using innovation concepts drawn from other areas of innovation studies (such as disruptive innovation, innovation systems, institutional innovation and socio-technical transitions) in highlighting how small-scale social experiments can ultimately lead to the solution of pressing societal problems.

The critique - and possible solutions

By way of an example, social innovation assumes that ideas can be created in protected spaces and then upscaled to the level of society without addressing the vested interests in the status quo that have created a market for the social innovation; it therefore seems useful to use the multi-level perspective of sustainable socio-technical transitions to better theorise the issues of upscaling involved in social innovation, so there is not just an implicit assumption that good ideas travel deservedly. Through a subtle critique of the current policy conception of social innovation, it is possible for Innovation Studies to help provide better insights into social innovation processes and ultimately to lead to better support frameworks and interventions for promoting solutions to these Grand Challenges.

This seminar reports work funded by an Eu-SPRI Forum Exploratory grant, and carried out by Paul Benneworth, Effie Amanatidou, Magnus Gulbrandsen and Monica Edwards Schachter.

Energy Seminar: New policy practices for a challenge-led, broad-based model of transformative innovation

Time and place: Jan. 16, 2015 9:00 AM – 11:00 AM, room 551, Eilert Sundts hus

What are the prospects for transformative innovation in Europe?

On January 16th, professor Fred Steward (Policy Studies Institute, University of Westminster) visits TIK to give a talk on the implications of the turn in European innovation policy towards societal challenges such as climate change. More specifically, Professor Stewart will link this discussion to the Climate-KIC Transition Cities Project.

This new challenge-led approach reframes the policy agenda compared to the traditional technology-driven model. It is more attuned to systemic rather than singular innovation, and offers a broader definition of innovation which highlights social, organizational and business novelty. It is argued that this offers a richer and more realistic perspective for the radical pervasive change needed for the transition to a low carbon society.

In this seminar, prospects for transformative innovation are addressed through a focus on the place-based socio-technical networks of mobility, buildings and energy. These are discussed in relation to the Climate-KIC Transition Cities Project involving Frankfurt, Birmingham, Bologna-Modena, Valencia-Castellon, Budapest and Wrocla.

Technology Innovation and contemporary challenges of Polish Enterprises

Time and place: Mar. 4, 2015 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM, room 551, Eilert Sundts hus

Dr. Karina Sachpazidu-Wójcicka visits TIK to talk about the relationship between the innovation potential and the possibilities of the use of technology transfer mechanisms by polish enterprises.

Towards a knowledge economy

Changes taking place in the global economy indicate a transition from traditional economy to a knowledge economy that is based on highly processed and high-tech products. The stage of economy transition advancement decides of competitiveness of individual companies, regions and countries.

Innovation is one of the main source of achieving competitive advantage. The rate of creation and implementation of innovation largely determines the competitive advantage of countries economy. Experiences of developed countries show that innovative firms are preferable from the point of view of their internal efficiency and positive impact on the dynamics of economic development.

Disappointing level of polish innovativeness

How does this concert to polish firms? Are they ready for innovation strategies under suggestions of EU?

As we can see, current level of innovativeness of polish economy is disappointing and far below the average of the European Union. On the other hand polish companies, especially industrial companies are looking for competitive advantage using different operation areas, as well in the marketing, production, research and development or management of the company. Additionally, efficient management of the innovation implementation processes becomes essential.

Technology transfer

The stage of development of Polish economy shows a lack of opportunities to participate actively in the process of initiating innovative activities under the country potential or especially in sector of enterprises. Companies do not have sufficient financial and human resources to conduct cost-intensive and risky R&D activity. It seems that the only way to increase innovativeness of firms is trough technology transfer. Using possibilities of external technology transfer companies can benefit from ready-made solutions, investing in proven and checked solutions. Acquisition of external technology is also cheaper and does not require the involvement of additional time of technology developing by the company.

The main goal of presentation is to show the relationship between the innovation potential and the possibilities of the use of technology transfer mechanisms by polish enterprises. Whether the polish companies have the conditions to obtain the transfer of technology, its implementation and transformation in innovation?

Low carbon energy futures: Making the markets work?

Time and place: Apr. 22, 2015 9:00 AM – 11:00 AM, room 450 Eilert Sundts hus

There is a new dissonance between markets, politics and investment which is creating structural uncertainty about key aspects of the prospective low carbon energy transition. This talk will focus on the UK electricity sector.

Markets, politics and investments

Historical studies of large scale socio-technical shifts indicate that enacting substantial infrastructure change requires a close alignment of markets, politics and investment decisions. Focusing on the UK electricity sector, this talk argues that there is a new dissonance between markets, politics and investment which is creating structural uncertainty about key aspects of the prospective low carbon energy transition.

The origins of this uncertainty lies in a form of market politics in the UK. The UK pioneered the liberalised model of energy governance where investment decisions were based on price signals mediated through the liberalised energy markets, with the role of government being confined to an indirect regulatory oversight function. Informed by insights from neo-classical micro-economic theory, the purpose of liberalised energy markets was to induce efficiencies across the industry by reflecting in tariffs the marginal costs of generating and delivering electricity to customers.

The prospective low carbon energy transition

This alignment of markets, politics and investment is now seen by many as inadequate to deliver the level of low carbon investment required over a relatively short time period to replace an ageing fleet of generators and to meet the UK’s legally binding greenhouse gas emissions reduction target of 80% by 2050. An alternative alignment is proposed where government takes a more active role in shaping energy markets by fundamentally realigning the balance of investment risk between customers, taxpayers and private investors. It is argued that a form hybrid governance is emerging where key market principles are retained as part of a nascent low carbon investment and innovation logic.

The talk will discuss this emerging form of hybrid energy governance in the UK, and how analytical tools from Science, Technology and Innovation Studies (STIS) can be deployed to analyse it.

Andrew Van de Ven: Government-University-Industry Ecosystems for Innovation and Economic Development

Time and place: May 5, 2015 2:00 PM – 4:00 PM, Auditorium 6, Eilert Sundts hus

In this seminar, professor Van de Ven will show some evidence and raise some questions about how Norway compares with other countries on indicators of ecosystems for innovation and economic development.

"Ecosystem" refers to an industrial infrastructure consisting of supply resources (such as education, research, finance), institutional arrangements (laws, regulations, standards, conventions), market demand (knowledgable consumers and competition) and proprietary activities (such as firm R&D, business functions and distribution channels).

Some implications of this ecosystem view will be discussed, including (1) Ecosystems develop unequally and take time; basic research by government and universities often predates proprietary business involvement by 20-40 years. (2) Ecosystems directly influence individual firms' time, cost, and risk of innovation, and (3) Research on the emergence of industrial ecosystems requires engaged scholarship between government, university, and industry stakeholders.

John A. Mathews: Renewables and the greening of the energy system - Is China driving the process?

Time and place: May 12, 2015 1:00 PM, room 551, Eilert Sundts hus

As new industrializing giants grow, how do they deal with an inconvenient truth?

On May 12th, Professor John A. Mathews will give a lecture on the China's role in developing new and innovative renewable energy systems.

Confronted with an inconvenient truth

Western industrialism has achieved miracles, promoting unprecedented levels of prosperity and raising hundreds of millions out of poverty since the industrial revolution. Industrial capitalism is now diffusing east, where Japan was the first, then the four Tigers (Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong) and now China are all incorporating themselves into the global industrial world. India, Brazil and many others are expecting to follow the same course. But as China, India, and other industrializing giants grow, they are confronted with an inconvenient truth: They cannot rely on the conventions of capitalism (fossil-fueled energy systems; resource throughput rather than circularity; generic finance) as we know them today, for reasons to do with spoliation of their own environment and energy and resource security as much as concerns over global warming.

More an economic imperative than a moral imperative

By necessity, a new approach to environmentally conscious development is already emerging in the East, with China leading the way. As opposed to western zero-growth advocates and free-market environmentalists, it can be argued that a more sustainable capitalism is being developed – as counterpart to the all-too obvious black developmental model based on coal. In Hu Angang’s words, this alternative is the “inevitable choice for China” – and by extension, one might say for other developing countries as well. China’s greening is more an economic imperative than a moral imperative.

Global impact

The energy industrial revolution that is under way in China has resulted in its creating the largest renewable energy system on the planet, and generating more green power from hydro, wind and solar photovoltaic sources than the US, Germany, India and Italy combined. China is greening its energy system at the margin, as demonstrated by 1) having generated more additional green electrical energy in 2014 than energy from thermal sources (mainly coal); 2) having added more capacity involving green sources than thermal sources; and 3) having invested more in green extensions of the grid than thermal. The cost reductions driven by China as it scales up its production of renewables are now having global impact, not just in trade and in energy concerns but in wider industrial activities. This is in every sense a major technoeconomic transition and should be viewed as such – the sixth such transition since the Industrial Revolution.

Strategic in nature

Falling prices for both oil and coal over recent months have led many to query whether policies supporting renewable energies will be sustained, or – as in the 1980s when oil prices were also plunging – lead to abandonment of renewables projects. This is unlikely to happen, because this time China is the major global investor. And China’s reasons for building up its renewable energy industries are strategic in nature, based on the need to enhance energy security and clear polluted skies – strategic goals which are not negated by falling oil or coal prices.

Franco Malerba: Catching up, sectoral systems and changes in industrial leadership

Time and place: May 20, 2015 1:00 PM – 3:30 PM, room 551, Eilert Sundts hus

Wednesday the 20th of May Professor Franco Malerba will visit TIK and give a seminar on the concept of catch up-cycles.

A framework that explains why successive changes in industry leadership (called catch-up cycles) take place in a sector over time is proposed. In catch up cycles latecomer firms and countries emerge as international leaders while incumbents decline; later on the new leaders are then dethroned by other newcomers.

In the identification of the factors at the base of catch up cycles, it is proposed to take a sectoral system view and to identify windows of opportunity that may emerge during the long run evolution of an industry. Three windows related to the specific dimensions of a sectoral system are identified: one related to changes in knowledge and technology, the second to changes in demand and the third to changes in institutions and public policy. It is the combination of the opening of a window (technological, demand or institutional/policy) and the response by firms and the sectoral system of the latecomer and incumbent country that determine changes in industrial leadership and catch up by latecomer firms. Sectors differ according to the type of windows that may open up and the responses by firms and systems.

Then, a history friendly model of successive changes in industrial leadership is briefly presented.

Misreading Experts: The case of the politics of climate change

Time and place: Sep. 23, 2015 1:00 PM – 3:00 PM, room 551, Eilert Sundts hus

On Wednesday the 23th of september Dr. Darrin Durant (University of Melbourne) will give a seminar on the politics of climate change.

What can the politics of climate change tell us about expertise, in general? And what can the politics of climate change tell us about the politics of Science and Technology Studies (STS), specifically? Maybe, of course, the two are not unrelated.

Different stories

I begin by recounting a story probably familiar to many, which asks why little gets done about climate change, the answer being some mix of conservative political interests or the state of capitalism or just bad timing as neoliberalism took hold. But then I compare that story to the story many of my STS colleagues have told about the politics of climate change. Here we have a story about experts behaving badly; specifically, being very unreflexive and wannabe dictators.

Immediately we are struck by the contrast, the political world or the experts behaving badly, depending upon who tells the story. So I tell another story. This story presents some of the results of a pilot project on climate change experts in Australia. Rather than lob stones at experts from afar, as I speculate some of my STS colleagues telling the stories noted above have done, I went and talked to the experts. I conducted a series of interviews with experts on the government Climate Change Authority and the (recently out of government) Climate Council.

Misreading experts

Either these Australians involved in climate change policy domains are exceptions to the apparent STS rule (of being unreflexive dictators), or there is something amiss with that apparent STS rule. I conclude the latter, and outline what might be another STS rule in play (given that I am an STS scholar and so must be allowed to make up my own rules too). My Aussie experts are not as (what I am calling) quixotically unreflexive as some subset of my STS colleagues’ general analysis of climate change politics would imply, not because of some random exceptionalism, but because they might the heirs to a sociological tradition I suggest STS only partially buys into but probably should buy into much more. Put succinctly, we should follow Alvin Gouldner more than we follow Howard Becker, and it might mean we misread experts a little less.

TIK Seminar: Domestication as Generative Practice, Marianne Lien

Time and place: Oct. 21, 2015 1:00 PM – 3:00 PM, room 551, Eilert Sundts hus

“Domestication by confinement” and “domestication by control” are key tropes of analyses that have rendered animals and plants passive in the making of domesticated species. How can we recapture domestication as a reflexive tool and a set of generative of world-making practices that are better fit for sharing life on a damaged planet than those domestication narratives that brought us here?

Drawing on an ethnographic case study of salmon aquaculture in Norway, this paper frames domestication as generative practice. Rather than assuming that the salmon domus is delineated by the salmon pen, it sees domestication as multiple processes operating at various scales, exceeding as well as imploding the notion of the domus as physical enclosure. Attention to relational textures, mutuality and temporality is central to this approach.

This paper takes salmon as a guide to recapturing relational practices of more-than-human encounters, and shows that what started as the domestication of a fish becomes domestication of an entire watershed.

The Triple Challenge for Europe: The Economy, Climate Change, and Governance

Time and place: Nov. 11, 2015 1:15 PM – 3:15 PM, room 2531, Georg Sverdrups hus

On November 11th, Prof. Jan Fageberg will hold a TIK seminar on the occasion of the launch of the book “The Triple Challenge for Europe: Economic Development, Climate Change, and Governance”.

Professor Jan Fagerberg will hold a TIK seminar on the occasion of the launch of the book “The Triple Challenge for Europe: Economic Development, Climate Change, and Governance” which he edited together with Staffan Laestadius (Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm) and Ben R. Martin (SPRU, University of Sussex).

The book, published by Oxford University Press, addresses the three key challenges that Europe is facing today – growth, climate change and innovation.

During his TIK seminar Prof Fagerberg will talk about how the three key challenges – economic stagnation, climate change and a governance crisis - are closely related and discuss how they can be dealt with more effectively in order to arrive at a more economically secure, environmentally sustainable and well-governed Europe.

In particular, a return to economic growth cannot come at the expense of greater risk of irreversible climate change. Instead, what is required is a fundamental transformation of the economy to a new green trajectory based on rapidly diminishing emission of greenhouse gases. This entails much greater emphasis on innovation in all its forms (not just technological).

Following this path would mean turning Europe into a veritable laboratory for sustainable growth, environmentally as well as socially.

Published May 23, 2024 1:08 PM - Last modified June 24, 2024 3:10 PM