The Triad-North America, Japan and Europe-now addresses diesel vehicle emissions by requiring 40-80% reductions from new heavy-duty trucks and passenger car diesels. The requirements imply introduction of new technology and fuels stepwise during 2005-2012 that will leave emissions from new diesel vehicles on par with the levels of gasoline passenger cars. This paper studies the recent development of diesel engine emission control in response to new regulation. The role for Swedish actors, including two of the world's major truck manufacturers, is especially studied. The increasingly global Technological System for diesel engine emission control is compelled to manage further reductions of nitrogen oxides emissions and fuel consumption and CO2, the balance of which has been the subject of several large legal disputes. Swedish OEMs are at present split into two technological sub-trajectories, while the future may be multi-pronged and include new engine types and fuels. Interestingly, similar commercial advantages that were sought by the pioneers introducing advanced feedback loop catalysis in gasoline cars in the 1970s are now sought by some heavy-duty diesel engine manufacturers by conversely avoiding the mainstream-Selective catalytic reduction-solution. Incremental innovation is the new radical.
The regional Special Commission for Decontamination of Chile's capital, Santiago, was formed in 1990. The issue of regulating passenger car emissions was one of the first initiatives on the commission's agenda, empowering a group of consultants and administrators to set up a structure for the transition in legal, economic, and commercial terms. In April 1992 the first car with a catalytic converter was sold as unleaded petrol became available, and from 1 September the same year a decree required every new car in the capital regions to be equipped with a catalytic converter. Chile thus introduced the automotive catalytic converter in little more than a year. It is argued that the critical factors for this process were the effective and efficient adoption and adaptation of foreign technology, policy, and market space, Chile's common understanding of the need to reduce emissions, and prevalent strong economic growth permitting widespread car ownership and renewal.
The starting point of the paper is the widely held assumption that the ability to permanently generate and market innovations is one major precondition to maintain competitiveness of European based units and thus to contribute to employment. The authors argue that R&D in the established sense is only one and mostly not the most important asset for an organisation's innovativeness. Drawing on the literature on dynamic capabilities a concept of innovation enabling capabilities is introduced. It is composed of two dimensions, transformative and configurational capabilities. The former focuses on the enduring ability of an organisation to transform globally available general knowledge into locally specific knowledge and competence, the latter on the enduring ability to synthesise novelty by creating new configurations of knowledge, artefacts and actors. Three specific aspects of configurational capabilities are established, cognitive: configuring distributed knowledge of different kind; organisational: configuring distributed actors and other repositories of knowledge and knowhow; and design: configuring functional features and solutions. The distinction between transformative and configurational capabilities is strictly analytical; empirically the two dimensions are tightly interwoven. And innovations require both. The different dimensions of innovation enabling capabilities are illustrated drawing on examples from a selection of company case studies conducted during the PILOT project.
During the 1980s and 1990s Finland and Sweden were on the international frontier in telecommunications, pioneering the first-generation cellular system and leading in the development of the second generation. This strength in telecommunications has developed under various regulatory regimes in a complex industrial history; going back to the nineteenth century. To account for this Fenno-Swedish telecom trajectory, the article starts out with Porter's model of industrial competitiveness and theories of public procurement, and then focus the attention and analysis in two directions: (i) the historical role of advanced, research-intensive users and competitive public-private development pairs; and (ii) the emergence and significance of a composite binational clusters and their local agglomerations in the accelerated industry growth in the 1990s.
I artikeln diskuteras hur den kortsiktiga hanteringen av dagens kris kan kombineras med långsiktig klimatomställning. Omfattande konsumtionsstimulanser, som nu införs i allt fler länder, bidrar sannolikt till att förvärra de omvandlingsproblem som klimatkrisen aktualiserar. Med utgångspunkt i en klimatanpassad keynesmodell undersöker artikeln villkoren för en krispolitikmed dubbla ambitioner. Utmaningen här är att skapa en kombination av stödför uthållighetsskapande investeringar och uthållig konsumtion på bekostnad av klimatbelastande konsumtion för att både gynna sysselsättningen på kort siktoch påskynda den långsiktiga strukturomvandlingen. Artikeln ger exempel påhur en sådan politik kan bedrivas och visar att regeringens nuvarande politik pekar i en annan riktning.
Three dimensions of physically based environmental accounting are indicated-regional, company and product accounting-these have developed along different paths. In the globalised and highly specialised economy of today, company activities and their services are multinational and are to a decreasing degree to be seen as a subset of regions. Consequently, these accounting practices intersect each other, on three dimensions, from micro to macro levels. Even though they are all based on physical and energy input/output (I/O) analysis the differences in terminology, structure and evaluation methods make it difficult to exchange data and use them efficiently. This paper explores several aspects of these three environmental accounting dimensions such as the control engineering tradition, the lack of adequate data and the resource consuming work as well as incompatibility, overlapping scopes and aims. The conclusion is that the three accounting dimensions are similar in construction in spite of a development in independent paths. The differences are not primarily the three-letter acronyms of the tools but the objectives and control scope used in studies. If adopting a common framework and a global all-dimensional nomenclature there are great potentials for increasing the work efficiency, making the tools towards sustainability more sustainable.
Europe today is confronted by fundamental changes in its external environment as well as internally, giving rise to several daunting policy challenges. First, there is the economic challenge manifest in slow growth or even stagnation in many countries, which, although also present in other parts of the world, is particularly severe in Europe. Second, there is the challenge posed by the climate crisis, the solution of which requires nothing less than a fundamental transformation from carbon-based growth to a new, sustainable economy. Without this, future generations will be in dire straits. The third challenge concerns the governance and policy crisis now facing Europe and the difficulties this poses for policy making and implementation. It might be argued that the recent rapid growth of immigration to Europe represents a fourth challenge.
Europe is confronted by an intimidating triple challenge-economic stagnation, climate change, and a governance crisis. What is required is a fundamental transformation of the economy to a new, "green" trajectory based on rapidly diminishing emission of greenhouse gases, the authors contend. Much greater emphasis on innovation in all its forms (not just technological) is an answer. Following this path would mean turning Europe into a veritable laboratory for sustainable growth, environmentally as well as socially.
The aim of this article is to explore the role of creativity for high-performance innovative activity. It is our conjecture that this approach enables us to go beyond the dominant science-focus of the present discourse on the transformation to a knowledge-based society. In line with the first part of the Schumpeterian definition of innovation: creative combination, the ability to be creative draws on dispersed - new and old, external and internal, scientific and non-scientific - knowledge sources. The article is primarily a theoretical and conceptual exercise: however, we relate our discussions to empirical findings from mature manufacturing industries. The discussions are also related to the current industrial transformation in the Iron Ore Belt in Sweden, and the possible challenges this entails for a region characterized by a strong tradition of large-firm domination and natural resource-based industry. In the current transformation, this region must find new ways to both encourage and support economic and technological development - something which may find its base not only in scientific skills in a narrow sense, but also in new attitudes to industrial creativity.