Niche strategy selection for kite-based Airborne Wind Energy technologies Delft University of Technology of University Delft Cover illustration: posted on RunGloriaRun-blog [source: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/- M4kYBctwGGU/U1XCK9SBbAI/AAAAAAAAJa0/CY2uu1l3dwo/s1600/kite+-+flying3.JPG ] Niche strategy selection For kite-based Airborne Wind Energy technologies By Matthew F.A. Doe in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Sustainable Energy Technology at the Delft University of Technology, to be defended publicly on Monday December 15, 2014 at 10:30. Graduation committee: Chairman: Prof. dr. C. P. Beers TU Delft Supervisors: Dr. J. R. Ortt TU Delft Dr. L. M. Kamp TU Delft An electronic version of this thesis is available at http://repository.tudelft.nl/. Foreword I would like to express my gratitude to following people for their input and support, without which this thesis would not have been possible: J.R. Ortt and L.M. Kamp for giving me the opportunity to undertake this ambitious thesis, despite that I am new to the social sciences as an engineer, and showing patience and guidance as supervisors while I learnt and improved a lot during this thesis. The members of Kitepower group at the Delft University of Technology, particularly Dr.-Ing. R. Schmehl, for inspiring me to do this thesis (as case). And along with other leading figures in the kite-based AWE world, for making time and effort for the interviews conducted in the thesis. I would like to thank my father for his relentless support and love during this thesis, and of course before it as well as. Without which this thesis would have not been completed, and is dedicated to my late mother. And thanks to the many dear and special friends I have, for their support and/or distraction during this thesis, especially the many and much needed coffee/lunch breaks. Matthew F.A. Doe Delft University of Technology December 2014 i ii Executive Summary Half a century ago the development of sustainable energy technologies started in response to environmental, political and resources crises. These crises still exist today, with increasing impacts on humanity and the planet, but the adoption of sustainable energy technologies on a significant scale is yet to occur. Despite the best efforts of engineers, researchers and innovators to propel the development of sustainable energy technologies towards reliable and competitive market products, they still stumble upon many barriers to develop and launch their sustainable innovations onto the market. As is the case with the Airborne Wind Energy (AWE), its development knows several challenges, despite its strong potential for cheap electricity generation by tapping into more powerful and stable winds using light airborne systems. In response to this gap between technological development and market adoption, a branch of the scientific community has devoted itself to better understand the barriers and adoption process of sustainable innovations. But even with this joint effort of technological development and scientific research into innovation adoption, an entrepreneurial managerial perspective to guide the accelerated transition to a renewable energy powered society is still to be developed. It is with this in mind that the thesis sets out to develop and provide guidance for innovative and entrepreneurial organisations, bringing sustainable innovations to market. It uses the transition theory of Strategic Niche Management (SNM), which states that (mass) market adoption can be achieved by experimentally developing the technology and market together in protected (market) spaces. In these protected spaces or niches, several experiments are setup, executed and analysed to learn and develop the innovation together with its application (markets), progressively maturing the innovation for the competitive mass market. The niches do not only shield the innovation against direct competition and fatal criticism, but also provide opportunities to start capitalising on the potential of the innovation. The experimental learning and development processes can be setup in different kinds of niches. For example, combining the innovate technology with existing technology and its infrastructure, or finding isolated or subsidized market applications. But the selection of these protected niches or niche strategies is not described in published literature, despite being historically proven that certain barriers to innovation adoption have been tackled with specific niche strategies. Hence, this thesis develops a niche strategy selection process to guide innovation actors in developing their innovations for market adoption. Focussing on the case of kite-based AWE technologies, the thesis presents most suitable niche strategies for this innovation, by using its barriers as input into the niche strategy selection process. For the development of the niche strategy selection for kite-based AWE technologies and the corresponding process, the thesis consists of three stages. The three stages of the thesis consecutively build upon the context, research, and validation, to attain the desired end results. iii The first stage of the thesis is to define the context of the thesis. It does this by describing and discussing the various options in the fields of transition theories and AWE respectively, before making a selection for SNM and kite-based AWE technologies, as the applied transition theory and case technology of the thesis. With the selected transition theory and case innovation the following stages are defined in their scope and direction, defining the context of the research done in this thesis. The second stage is the research done into barriers, niche strategies, and the links or relations between them. The three components of barriers, niche strategies, and links, form the input, output, and algorithm of the niche strategy selection process respectively, and are based upon findings from published literature. For both the barriers and niche strategies, first the general framework or overview is determined and presented, before applying it to the case innovation of AWE technologies. Stage 2 consists of a dedicated chapter for barriers, and a chapter for niche strategies and their links to barriers. The barrier chapter introduces the earlier reviewed barrier framework and definition, before extracting barriers to market adoption from published literature, categorizing and ranking the extracted barriers using the barrier framework. This results in a barrier ranking of the most influential barriers to market adoption in the case of AWE technologies. The chapter on niche strategies conducts a review of published literature on identified distinct niche strategies, adopting a list of ten niche strategies presented by Ortt et al. (2013). The chapter continues in a following section with the identification of the links between barriers and niche strategies. Partially building on the presented findings of Ortt et al. (2013), and partially by proposing links based on case examples, for the links missing for certain barriers, a complete matrix of links is presented. The resulting matrix of links between barriers and niche strategies allows its application to the innovation case, determining the most suitable niche strategies for AWE technologies based on its barrier ranking. The collective results from published literature forms; the general niche strategy selection process, as well as presenting the barrier ranking and niche strategy selection for AWE technologies, to be discussed and validated in stage 3. The third stage is the validation of the literature-based findings and the developed selection process of stage 2, by presenting it to experts and interviewing them for their perspectives. By choosing to use individual structured interviews, the independent views and perspectives of the experts in kite-based AWE technologies are obtained. This allows for the interview results to strengthen the niche strategy selection process and its results for AWE technologies, and determine the consistency amongst experts. The structured results of the individual interviews are predominately used to validate the findings and selection process from the previous stage. The validation is done by comparing the original unaltered perspectives of experts, to those after presenting the findings and the selection process, as well as comparing them to interactive and further processed results. This determines whether the results of stage 2 are consistent with the perspectives of the interviewed experts, regarding effectiveness and coverage, validating the niche strategy selection and selection process for kite-based AWE technologies. iv Through the three stages of research done in the thesis, the following results have come forward for the case of kite-based AWE technologies. The barrier framework introduced in stage 2 differs from others applied to SNM and requires some explanation. It consists of two lists of factors describing the potential ’indirect causes’ and ‘direct impacts’ of barriers, which combine to form a barrier-set that describe the barrier by its cause and impact on an innovation organization. The barrier-sets are ranked to form a barrier-ranking of influence. The original literature-based ranking of barriers of AWE technologies is altered in response to experts’ on average higher ranking of institutional barriers. Hence the barrier-set of ‘Knowledge of Technology – Institutional aspects’ has moved from 5th to 4th position. The resulting barrier