Learning strategies in sustainable energy demonstration projects: What organizations learn from sustainable energy demonstrations

This literature review study presents and discusses the learning strategies of organizations participating in sustainable energy demonstration projects. It finds that academic, commercial, and governmental organizations build on six major learning strategies. The first learning strategy is to capture intellectual property and benefit from knowledge spillovers. The second learning strategy comprises the building of a series of prototypes that are technically and commercially fit for purpose. The third learning strategy aims at operating production plants that produce the prototypes on a large scale. The fourth learning strategy concentrates on exploiting learning curves in these production plants. The fifth learning strategy focuses on creating supply-demand networks that serve increasing markets. Finally, the sixth learning strategy is to develop governmental regulation and funding schemes that support the emergence of an industrial and societal institutional infrastructure for sustainable energy technology, based on the lessons learned from the demonstration projects. This study also finds that the six learning strategies are facilitated by four key behaviors of participants in demonstration projects, which are mutual trust-building, decision-making in favor of sustainable energy technology, learning-network building, and demonstration program development. To academics, this study provides a comprehensive insight into organizations’ learning strategies in sustainable energy demonstration projects, regarding learning directions and outcomes. Its contribution to practice is that it supports academic, commercial, and governmental organizations in managing their portfolio of learning strategies in new sustainable energy demonstration projects.