The Influence of Incumbent Industries in Mission-Oriented Innovation Policy Targeting Carbon Lock-In

Carbon lock-in has been used to explain the difficulty in reducing carbon emissions, while mission innovation policies have been proposed to break this path dependency, but the force of lock-in during the mission setting process is largely overlooked. In particular, the power of incumbents to shape the direction of the mission and suppress disruptions is absent. Here we propose the following three categories to describe the impact of disruptive innovations an incumbent's market share: New Market, Market Rewarding, or Market Destroying. We argue that the lock-in mechanisms apply at the setting of the mission goal so that for mission-oriented innovation policy to be successful it must overcome lock-in at the mission setting step. To illustrate the role of institutional lock-in in defining a mission we present a detailed case-study of the role of mission-oriented policy in the development of technology to produce the Canadian oil sands. The case study illustrates how shifts in incumbency opposition to a mission-oriented innovation policy coincided with the changing impact of the innovation from market destroying to market rewarding. We suggest that mission-oriented innovation policies to address climate change must be designed to break free of these constraints and extract lessons to guide the design