Fostering transformation: A governance frame for large public and private organisations as change agents in transformations

This article seeks to fill a critical gap in the context of mission oriented and transformative policies by conceptualising generic governance conditions for large public and private organisations to engage constructively with the transformation of wider socio-technological systems as an ongoing learning process. So far, innovation and other policies to achieve transformative missions tend to rely on established instruments, mostly supply side, fostering research and innovation activities to move in desired directions. More sophisticated approaches stimulate absorption and diffusion of innovation and support market creation and uptake. However, for existing socio-technological systems to shift towards sustainability, constitutive actors within such systems, like large public and private organisations, need to actively foster the transformation, as a process of internal and external organisational experimentation and innovation. They are critical actors in their respective system context in two ways: in the past they have co-produced the problematic effects of existing systems; in the future they can severely influence the speed and direction of transition of systems and act as change agents towards more sustainable systems - provided they manage to transform themselves, too. Those actors are very diverse organisations, ranging from large companies, governmental funding bodies, higher education institutions, and related intermediary organisations. They are situated between the individuals and their behaviour on the one hand and the broader systems level on the other, i.e. at the meso level of systems change, where they fulfil critical systemic functions. ...