The Entrepreneurial State

This chapter looks at the entrepreneurial state where the bulk of transitions scholarship has focussed to date. Indeed, technological change is a vital component of successful transitions and deeper transformations. Attention has often focussed on how support can be provided to ‘niche’ technologies and innovations that might ultimately disrupt dominant socio-technical regimes, in part through building markets for new products and services through financing, infrastructures and the generation of demand. The chapter explores the use of policy tools such as financial instruments including subsidies and feed-in-tariffs and industrial policy to support innovation and, implicitly or explicitly, ‘pick winners’. In discussing the transformation of the entrepreneurial state, the chapter explores the question of ‘exnovation’: taking unsustainable technologies out of production and the need to align innovation policy with the need to transform structures and levels of production and consumption which presents a series of challenges for growth-oriented industrial capitalist states and requires a more social, ecological and inclusive vision of innovation and who the innovators are in society.