This paper combines literature on program management and the multi-level perspective on sustainability transitions to analyze how a firm within the petrochemical industry negotiates across niches and regimes in its transition-oriented program. The analysis shows that this strategic change program comprises three types of projects—exploitation, exploration, and hybrid. In the context of the firms’ ambition to attain net-zero emissions, individual projects of all three types play distinctive roles. In exploitation projects, negotiations stay at the regime level, which reinforces existing institutions but also enables a transfer of certain emission-reducing technologies. In contrast, exploration and hybrid projects entail negotiations that cut across niche and regime levels. For hybrid projects, we find that niche-regime negotiations remain predominantly internal, while they are externalized in exploration projects. Clarifying the relationship between internal and external negotiations, our work suggests that strategic project sequencing could facilitate transition-oriented programs. Run in sequence, exploration projects may help mobilize external support and resources, hybrid projects can safeguard internal support, and exploitation projects can enable companywide diffusion of practices that support the net-zero objectives.

The events industry is evolving as sustainability and digitalization increasingly shape how events are designed, organized, and experienced. This report explores how these twin transitions unfold in the Swedish event industry and their influence on transport efficiency.

Using a mixed-methods approach, this study draws on interviews, field observations, document analyses, and survey data collected between 2021 and 2025 across a diverse range of events, including fairs, congresses, conferences, and sports events.

The findings show that digitalization is now a structurally embedded feature of the industry. Digital and hybrid formats expand accessibility, extend the temporal and spatial boundaries of events, and enable new forms of experience design, while reinforcing the unique value of physical co-presence for networking, informal interaction, and sensory engagement.

Sustainability has moved from a peripheral concern to a strategic priority, supported by certifications, circular material practices, and climate-smart catering, although its implementation varies across event types and actors. Transport efficiency emerges as both a challenge and an opportunity, highlighting the need to reconsider when physical travel is necessary and how events are organized in space and time. Overall, the report suggests that the future of the event industry lies not in replacing physical events but in integrating digitalization, sustainability, and transport efficiency in ways that balance environmental responsibility with the social and experiential value of events.

Sustainability transitions, such as electrifying the process industry, require a bundle of related innovations to make meaningful progress. Drawing on literature on innovation through tinkering, that is, adaptive, typically small-scale experimentation with various forms of innovation, and applying a micropolitical perspective, this qualitative study explores how actors within an ecosystem tinker to bundle innovations to provide the necessary directionality for such transitions. Based on a case study of electrifying the process industry in a petrochemical cluster in Northern Europe, the paper presents an emergent process model of three complementary modes of tinkering: tinkering to codevelop a common vision for the transition, tinkering to create new spaces for bundling transition-oriented innovations and tinkering to arrive at transition-oriented innovations. The combined use of these modes helps overcome collective inaction, enabling actors to essentially tinker their way towards sustainability. The findings show that tinkering, enacted through micropolitical manoeuvring, provides the flexibility, adaptability and experimentation needed for actors to advance their sustainability agendas while still moving in a unified direction.

Following the tradition of using opposing concepts as a basis for organisational analysis, this article advances a theory-based understanding of incumbent firms in sustainability transitions. Building on seminal transition studies, we propose innovating/defending and collaborating/competing as two useful spectra to describe organisational behaviours in transitions. Presenting the automotive industry as an explanatory case, we show results from a systematic literature review that reveal motives for diverging behaviours. Combining the spectra into a 2 x 2 matrix, we then introduce four conceptualisations to explain the observed motives and behaviours. The conceptualisations are associated with different streams of organisation theory: dynamic capabilities and the resource-based view, resource-dependence theory, neo-institutional theory and theories on organisational learning and path dependence. Referring to organisational ambidexterity, value configurations and political arenas, we conclude that transitions research can reach a more multifaceted understanding by challenging the prevailing notion of the firm as a coherent actor.

If you visit Linköping, you have good chances to see electrified cars, or you may even take a ride on an electric city bus. However, you will have some difficulty spotting one of the very few electric trucks operating in the city. The transition to a road-based goods transportation system with electrified trucks is much slower than the transition to electrified passenger transport in Sweden. Part of the explanation for this are the profound system changes required to realize a competitive electrified goods transportation system, a system that involves different firms with significantly different resources and varying relationships to existing system structures. This thesis aims to contribute to transition studies by mapping out how firm-system interactions unfold during an ongoing sustainability transition. Therefore, attention is placed on how dynamic transition processes are affected by firms with stakes in the emerging socio-technical system for electrified goods transportation. The thesis also emphasizes the firms' limitations in shaping the environment in which the electrified trucks will operate. The data on which the thesis is based was collected within the context of two research projects, both funded by the Swedish Energy Agency and affiliated with the Swedish Electromobility Center. The data collection included observations at 42 industry events and 34 semi-structured interviews with different actors involved in the development of electrified goods transportation in Sweden. In addition, a literature review was conducted based on articles in the research community of transition studies, highlighting how established firms in the automotive sector handle major transitions of socio-technical systems.   

In general, the thesis contributes to the ongoing discussion in transition studies about the role of firms in transitions. In particular, there is a vivid discussion about two issues in this research community: how established firms can contribute to ongoing transition processes and how to understand the interactions between firms and systems during ongoing transitions. This thesis synthesizes the results of five articles to address these questions in three main ways. First, the thesis contributes to the discussion on incumbent firms with an "extreme" empirical case of system reconfiguration, characterized by the interactions between two socio-technical systems where incumbent firms play the role of users and producers in both systems. The thesis describes how different incumbent firms have different system functions and different resources and how these functions and resources are reshaped as the new system emerges. Second, the dissertation contributes with a conceptualization of two types of interactions between firms and systems, covering how the firm can influence the emerging system and how feedback from the emerging system travels back to the firm. The thesis nuances the academic discussions on firm-system interactions by considering the possibilities of established firms to strategically invest in a favorable dynamic of co-evolution between their own resources and the emerging socio-technical system. Third, the thesis develops analytical tools to investigate how incumbent firms can influence changes in their environment by contributing to the design of favorable future markets and to understand how incumbent firms influence problem-solution couplings during transitions.   

Om du besöker Linköping har du goda chanser att se elektrifierade personbilar eller åka en eldriven stadsbuss. Däremot kan du ha svårt att upptäcka en av de mycket få elektriska lastbilar som körs i staden. Övergången till ett vägbaserat godstransportsystem med elektrifierade lastbilar går betydligt långsammare än övergången till elektrifierade persontransporter i Sverige. En del av förklaringen till detta är de djupgående systemomställningar som krävs för att förverkliga ett konkurrenskraftigt elektrifierat godstransportsystem, ett system som inbegriper olika företag med väsentligt olika resurser, och varierande relationer till befintliga systemstrukturer. Denna avhandling syftar till att kartlägga hur dynamiska omställningsprocesser påverkas av företag med intressen i det framväxande sociotekniska systemet för elektrifierade godstransporter. I avhandlingen betonas också de begränsningar som företagen har när det gäller att forma den omgivning som de elektrifierade lastbilarna ska verka i. Den data som avhandlingen bygger på samlades in inom ramen för två forskningsprojekt som båda finansierades av Energimyndigheten och var kopplade till forskningscentret Swedish Electromobility Center. Datainsamlingen omfattade observationer vid 42 branschevenemang och 34 semistrukturerade intervjuer med olika aktörer som är involverade i utvecklingen av elektrifierade godstransporter i Sverige. Dessutom gjordes en litteraturöversikt av artiklar inom forskningsfältet omställningsstudier (transiton studies) som belyser hur etablerade företag inom fordonssektorn hanterar större omställningar av sociotekniska system.  

Avhandlingen bidrar till den pågående diskussionen inom omställningsstudier om företagens roller i omställningar. I synnerhet finns det en livlig diskussion kring två frågor i detta forskningsfält: hur etablerade företag kan bidra till pågående omställningsprocesser och hur man kan förstå samspelet mellan företag och system under pågående omställningar. Genom en syntes av fem artiklar belyser den här avhandling dessa frågor på tre huvudsakliga sätt. För det första bidrar avhandlingen till diskussionen om etablerade företag med ett "extremt" empiriskt fall av systemrekonfigurering, som kännetecknas av interaktionen mellan två sociotekniska system där etablerade företag har rollen som användare och producenter i båda systemen. Avhandlingen beskriver hur olika etablerade företag har olika systemfunktioner och olika resurser, och hur dessa funktioner och resurser omformas när det nya systemet växer fram. För det andra bidrar avhandlingen med konceptualiseringar kring två typer av interaktioner mellan företag och system, dels hur företaget kan påverka systemet och dels återkopplingar till företaget från det framväxande systemet. Avhandlingen nyanserar akademiska diskussioner om interaktioner mellan företag och system genom att ta hänsyn till etablerade företags möjligheter att strategiskt satsa på en gynnsam dynamik i samutvecklingen mellan deras egna resurser och det framväxande sociotekniska systemet. För det tredje utvecklar avhandlingen analytiska verktyg för att undersöka hur etablerade företag kan få inflytande över förändringar i sin omgivning genom att bidra till utformningen av gynnsamma framtida marknader, samt att förstå hur etablerade företag påverkar hur problem och lösningar kopplas samman under omställningar.   

Examining how actively constructed processes of demand articulation can enable upscaled technology diffusion, this paper introduces a distinction between pre-commercial and commercial demonstrations. The paper argues that these two forms of demonstration play different roles in the adoption of innovative technologies. Whereas pre-commercial demonstrations are initiated to facilitate entry into niche markets, commercial demonstrations are devised to ease entry to mass markets. The paper presents a comparative case analysis of commercial demonstration projects featuring electrified heavy trucks in urban applications. The analysis focuses on the relation between the technologies and the selection environments they operate in, showing how stakeholders actively shape selection environments in commercial demonstrations. The analysis further shows how network relationships and lessons learned empower stakeholders to articulate forceful demands on institutional changes that promote an upscaled technology diffusion.