Barjak, Franz
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Segmenting household electricity customers with quantitative and qualitative approaches
Understanding private electric utility customers is essential given their central role in the sustainability transition of the electricity system. Socio-economic attributes, environmental attitude, and electricity consumption are not enough to take the new technological, economic and regulatory bases of the residential electricity markets in many industrialized countries into account. Further attributes can help to obtain a more holistic understanding of the private electricity customer. We conduct three studies and find a good correspondence of the customer segments resulting from a survey of the literature, an expert workshop, and a survey of Swiss electricity customers. Five key customer segments are distinguished: 1) affluent and quality-oriented, 2) ecologically aware, 3) technophile, 4) regionally rooted, and 5) stable and uninterested. Due to their unique energy preferences, these customer segments represent critical boundary conditions for technology adoption driven sustainability transitions. Assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the segmentation methods suggest that with sufficient resources a combination can produce reliable and valid segments.
Paving the way for a new composite indicator on business model innovations
The paper conceptualises business model innovations (BMI) as a fundamental change of the mechanisms and arrangements of how a company creates, delivers and captures value. It translates this definition into a composite innovation indicator that consists of a combination of radical product and radical process innovations, or radical product innovations combined with marketing and organisational innovations. Implementing this definition with empirical data from the Community Innovation Surveys (CIS) in Europe, we find that roughly one out of 20 SMEs has introduced a BMI in the three-year period preceding the surveys. Deepening our understanding of the construct by means of an exploratory analysis of 60 BMI case studies, we find that revenue model innovations have not been captured sufficiently in the CIS datasets. At the same time, they constitute an essential element and characterize a significant number of BMI cases. We suggest that innovation surveys should introduce questions on revenue model innovations and add a few further changes to better capture business model innovations in the future.
Supporting policy learning by means of an evaluation synthesis: findings from a study on Swiss innovation policies
Der vorliegende Beitrag fasst eine Sekundäranalyse von 16 Analysen der Innovationspolitik des Bundes aus dem Zeitraum 1997-2012 zusammen. Eine Meta-Evaluation zeigte, dass die Praxis der Evaluation von Innovationspolitik in der Schweiz hinsichtlich Methoden und Ergebnissen vergleichbar ist mit der Praxis in anderen europäischen Ländern. Allerdings gibt es auch Verbesserungsmöglichkeiten im Hinblick auf 1) die Beschreibung von Evaluationskonzeption und Methoden, 2) die Auswahl von Kontrollgruppen, 3) die Kombination quantitativer und qualitativer Methoden und 4) die Berücksichtigung aller Stakeholder einer innovationspolitischen Intervention. Eine Evaluationssynthese lieferte Erkenntnisse zu Konsistenz, Effizienz, Zielerreichung und Wirkungen der Innovationsförderung.