Breaking the chains A technological and industrial transformation beyond papermaking: Technology management of incumbents

Sammanfattning: In recent years, the necessity and opportunity for transforming pulp and paper mills into integrative units for large-scale output of biochemicals, biomaterials, and biofuels have come up in discussions of industrial renewal in the Northern hemisphere (mainly in Canada, Sweden and Finland). This transformation is related to technology shifts as well as changing business models based on new bioproducts due to profoundly new market conditions. The aim of this dissertation is to analyse how wood-based biomass industries – with an emphasis on incumbent pulp and paper industries (PPIs) – are managing this industrial and technological transformation that is taking place beyond the papermaking paradigm. Innovation theories on mature industries, their incumbents, and their propensity for technological lock-in and inertia are well-known. How new entrants and incumbents manage these large shifts is seen as central in understanding the dynamics of new, large-scale sustainable technologies on the one hand and the renewal of large, mature process industries on the other. Three research questions are addressed. First, where are the knowledge and technology frontiers developing in this transformation? Second, how are incumbents of PPIs are managing large market and technology shifts based on existing capabilities and knowledge bases? Third, what are the key mechanisms behind the transformation of PPIs from a process-industry perspective? The hermeneutical insights into the system of biomass technologies in general and the PPI industries in particular were gained by using a qualitative case-study approach, which formed the basis for four research articles and for outlining the empirical context and key words search of the quantitative bibliometric methods in a fifth research article. The research findings and main contributions address an identification of the, analytical, “formal”, science-based technology frontiers from a knowledge base perspective.  Old industrialised forest/PPI nations tended to specialize in rather slow growing, forest-based frontiers. They seem to have stayed close to the research trajectories of their woody raw material and knowledge base with the exception of North America. However, this not the entire explanation of transformation and technology development. Chemical pulp mills, in several cases developed into biorefineries, are the nexus of the emerging development block. They are contributing with products in a bioeconomy that is actively moving away from fossils and polluting materials (such as cement, cotton, plastics). In addition, demo plants (potentially nurturing hundreds of bioproducts) that are present at mill sites and involve different stakeholders, can act as the interface between analytical and synthetic knowledge bases that otherwise are difficult to combine in the upscaling phases of process industries. The response of PPI organizations to shifts in both technology and business models is also explained by the concept of diverging innovations of non-assembled products. These are part of a diversification of an industry from a forest industry perspective, and also of a diversification that may enter trajectories of several by-products and side-streams of the pulp “biorefinery” mill, and have analogies to a product-tree and to the material transformation flow of its production systems. But it is also a phenomenon of synergies in a broader multi-sectorial perspective, i.e. new sets of related products/processes that are able to replace industries of non-assembled products under the above-mentioned, new market conditions. The phenomenon of diverging innovations can be regarded as both an empirical contribution – the breaking up of a closed integrated process industry into something new with several emerging and integrative industries as a response to the large shifts in papermaking and sustainable needs in society – and as a theoretical remark on the model for non-assembled products presented by Utterback (1994).