Socio-technical transition pathways and social networks: a toolkit for empirical innovation studies

In this note we investigate socio-technical transition pathways concentrating our attention on innovation niches formations. Specifically, we present a methodological conceptualization of innovation-niches and propose a preliminary protocol, based on a Social Network Analysis (SNA), aiming to capture and measure the internal status of niches. The suggested protocol provides a toolkit with insights on three SN concepts which can be used to study and measure the evolution process of technological niches. This allowed us to suggest a set of possible policy actions, which derives directly from the conceptualisation of innovation-niches propose in this paper. Although preliminary, we believe this study represents an important step in a much-needed direction, which is science-policy interface in socio-technical transition studies.