The rise and fall of self-service in Amsterdam trams: User technology relations in a case of service innovation

The stabilisation of innovative technology depends on reconciling technological requirements and user behaviour. This can be achieved by adjusting the technology to the users, by configuring the user, or by a combination thereof. This paper evaluates different strategies in a case of service innovation: the substitution of conductors with self-service machines in the Amsterdam tramways around 1970 and the various forms of fare-dodging that came along. To counteract fare-dodging, the transport company unsuccessfully relied on a strategy to configure users. Alternative strategies, notably configuring users through technological adjustment, are suggested to increase the chance of stabilisation. These observations and suggestions are related to the actual characteristics of services: given that transport services are immediately and collectively used, their misuse, if not corrected by fellow passengers, soon tends to threaten the aspect of stability. Emphasising service characteristics thus contributes to a better understanding of strategies to reconcile services and users.

The politics of displacements. Towards a framework for democratic evaluation

The confrontation of values and interests and an impact in the public realm constitutes a broadly recognised political dimension of technological innovation processes. There is, however, a gap between empirical research into these politics of innovation and normative research into their democratic evaluation. Especially methods for evaluating the democratic quality of dynamic and non-formal forms of innovation politics are lacking. This paper aims to fill the gap by developing a framework for analysing the politics of innovation in terms of displacements of issues. Its first part reviews different theoretical approaches and concludes that decision-making about design and use generally takes place in a multitude of settings and that this circumstance calls for theoretical investigation of displacements between settings. In the second part, the notions of ‘issue’, ‘setting’, and ‘displacement’ are further elaborated and related to one another. A conceptual framework is construed that is suggested to be helpful in the democratic evaluation of the politics of displacements. The paper ends with a reflection on the applicability of recently developed democratic criteria. Because these criteria are devised for proceduralised and static decision-making processes, they needed to be reduced to three democratic principles that are general enough to capture local variation and specific enough to make a difference between good and bad politics.

The distribution of decision-making. The case of a flexible public transport system

Instead of explaining the outcomes of a policy process with reference to a rational planning logic, this paper scrutinises the circumstances in which decisions actually are taken. It follows issues when they displace between different decision-making settings. The approach is applied to a case of decision-making about a flexible public transport system in and around Hoogeveen, the Netherlands: a case in which the decision-making process was distributed over no less than fifteen settings. The main result of the analysis is a typology of five different displacements based on typical framing effects, which could form the basis of a theory with which complex, interactive and opportunistic decision-making processes can be understood in more general terms.decision-making, transport policy, innovation, public transport, displaced politics

One size fits all? Accession to the internal market; an industry level assessment of EU enlargement

Enlargement of the EU with ten Central and Eastern European Countries is a major item on the EU's policy agenda. Assessing the economic consequences of the accession to the internal market is not obvious. This paper provides a new method to quantify the impact of the accession. The assessment is based on a gravity-equation, estimated for 16 industries. The estimations exploit the fact that the current EU members already operate in a Single Market since 1992. The estimations provide information on the barriers, at the level of industries, that the Single Market program succeeded to remove. This is used to assess the industry-level impact of enlargement, for the current EU members and for the accession countries. � This approach yields different estimates for the impact of accession to the internal market for the different industries and different countries. The impact of accession to the internal market is notably large in Agriculture, Textiles, Trade Services, Transport Equipment, Non-metallic Minerals and Food Processing. Moreover, the aggregate excess trade within the internal market is comparable to what other studies find. The shock of accession to the internal market is plausibly largest for the accession countries. For the current members of the EU the upcoming enlargement likely has the largest impact for Austria, Greece and Germany.

User producer interaction in context: a classification

Science, Technology and Innovation Studies show that intensified user producer interaction (UPI) increases chances for successful innovations, especially in the case of emerging technology. It is not always clear, however, what type of interaction is necessary in a particular context. This paper proposes a conceptualization of contexts in terms of three dimensions – the phase of technology development, the flexibility of the technology, and the heterogeneity of user populations – resulting in a classification scheme with eight different contextual situations. The paper identifies and classifies types of interaction, like demand articulation, interactive learning, learning by using and domestication. It appears that each contextual situation demands a different set of UPI types. To illustrate the potential value of the classification scheme, four examples of innovations with varying technological and user characteristics are explored: the refrigerator, clinical anaesthesia, video cassette recording, and the bicycle. For each example the relevant UPI types are discussed and it is shown how these types highlight certain activities and interactions during key events of innovation processes. Finally, some directions for further research are suggested alongside a number of comments on the utility of the classification

Environmental policy competition and differential tax treatment; a case for tighter coordination?

The Kyoto Protocol binds the level of greenhouse gas emissions in participating countries. It does not, however, dictate how the countries are to achieve this level. The economic costs of reaching emission targets are generally evaluated to be low. For example, evaluations with applied general-equilibrium models estimate the costs to be in the range of 0.2% to 0.5% of GDP, when international trade in emissions rights among governments is allowed for. We argue that important costs are overlooked since governments have an incentive to choose highly distorting tax schemes. This paper shows that governments generally choose different energy tax rates for households and for internationally operating firms as the result of tax competition or pollution competition: in the first case, governments try to undercut other governments to attract firms to their country, whereas in the second, they try to push dirty industries across the border. In both cases, the incentive for firms and households to use or save energy is different at the margin. Both cases call for coordination of climate change policies that goes beyond a binding ceiling on greenhouse gas emissions and international trade in permit rights among governments alone.

Sectoral Productivity Growth and R&D Spillovers in the Netherlands

This paper assesses empirically whether R&D spillovers are important and whether they originate from domestic or foreign activities. Data for eleven sectors are used to explain the impact on total factor productivity of R&D by the sector itself, by other Dutch sectors and by foreign sectors. We find that both domestic and foreign R&D are significant for the Dutch economy. The elasticity of total factor productivity with respect to R&D is approximately 35% for R&D by the sector itself, 18% for R&D by other Dutch sectors and 1½% for R&D by foreign sectors. Our findings also suggest that more R&D speeds up the absorption of foreign technologies. These results are confirmed in an analysis where we look at manufacturing and services separately. We find one difference: R&D in the service sectors helps to absorb foreign technologies, whereas R&D in manufacturing does not.R&D spillovers;productivity growth

THE TOWER OF BABEL? THE INNOVATION SYSTEM APPROACH VERSUS MAINSTREAM ECONOMICS.

The Innovation systems (IS) approach and the system failures it identifies, play an important role in the design and legitimization of innovation policy. This paper analyses the usefulness of this concept. We conclude that the IS-approach can be useful to visualize the complexity of the innovation processes. However, for policy design this approach is less suited, because system failures aim at symptoms in stead of underlying incentive structures. In our view, policy design should be based on standard economic framework of market- and government failures. Theoretically, an exception is the system failure path dependency. However, the empirical evidence for the existence of this phenomenon is mixed. Furthermore, policy initiatives to tackle path dependence are likely to be subject to severe government failure.innovation policy, Innovation systems, market failure

The Rising Skill Premium, Technological Change and Appropriability

In the US the skill premium and the nonproduction/production wage differential increased strongly from the late 1970s onwards. Skillbiased technological change, trade with unskilledabundant countries and changes in the (domestic) supply of skilled workers have been proposed as explanatory factors. By the method of eliminating the impossible, skillbiased technological change is argued to be the dominant explanation. This paper shows that the dismissal of the increased supply of skill which is argued to be countervailing rising skill premiums is premature. In a simple model, well embedded in the literature on R&D, knowledge accumulation and (semi)endogenous growth, it is shown that the demand curve for skilled labour might well be upward sloping. Our key assumption is that skilled labour is employed in nonproduction activities that both generate and use knowledge inputs. It is shown that the tension between nonrivalness and appropriability of R&D output is crucial for the sign of the slope of the skilldemand curve. A necessary condition for an upward sloping demand curve is the ability of firms to appropriate the intertemporal returns from nonproduction activities.