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Overcoming Scarcities Through Innovation: What Do Technologists Do When Faced With Constraints?
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The question that still divides many debates about sustainability is the possibility of technological substitution of scarce natural resources. While there is considerable debate among economists whether technology can mitigate scarcities through development of substitutes, there is little actual research on the mechanisms and limitations of this substitution process. In this study, I seek to build a bridge between scarcity and innovation literatures to study when technologists decide to develop technological substitutes. My starting point is the theory of technology as a recombination of existing mental and physical components. Combining this theory with modern scarcity literature that differentiates between absolute, relative, and quasi-scarcities yields a more nuanced framework for understanding both different types of scarcities, and how technologists decide whether or not to develop or adopt technological substitutes. This improves our understanding of the possibilities — and limitations — of scarcity-induced innovation. I then illustrate the use of this framework with two brief historical case studies about constraint-induced innovation. I conclude that the mainstream economic practice of assuming that substitution will occur automatically, even in cases of absolute scarcity, may hide extremely important phenomena from discussion and debate behind a veil of circular reasoning.
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... Resource scarcity and its consequences have been investigated from a variety of perspectives; there are historical approaches (Korhonen, 2018), technology studies (Bretschger, 2005), consumer research (Cannon et al., 2019;Hamilton et al., 2019;Huijsmans et al., 2019) and of course studies from the field of economics (Osés-Eraso and Viladrich-Grau, 2007;Panayotakis, 2013;Prediger et al., 2014). However, surprisingly little is known about the socio-psychological perspective on the perception of scarcity regarding natural resources. ...
... Apart from the focus on behavioral changes, Bretschger (2005) proposed that technological innovations can help overcoming scarcity. Technological innovations can indeed represent opportunities to tackle the reduced energy or food supply and are likely to emerge over time (see also Korhonen, 2018). Further, new technologies can foster more efficient production processes that need fewer resources. ...
... On an individual level, people confronted with extreme financial scarcity, who just lost their favorite job, could for example, engage in the consumption of high caloric food as a compensatory behavioral strategy. On an institutional level, given a shortage in resources, politicians or institutions might instigate structural changes and engineers might develop more efficient technological innovations (e.g., Korhonen, 2018). The assumption of broadened attention and an increased creativity was bolstered by recent research of Goldsmith et al. (2020) showing that the salience of scarcity triggered more abstract thinking (i.e., higher level of construal) and also by research of Mehta and Zhu (2016), who demonstrated an increase in creativity under salience of scarcity. ...
Experts worldwide point to the challenges our world is facing (e.g., land degradation, resource scarcity, global warming) as described by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Many studies have analyzed how to cope with these challenges. Aside from promoting pro-environmental behaviors, it was proposed that technological innovations might provide the potential to cope with and compensate for natural resource scarcity. We conducted an online survey (N = 404) investigating how people's scarcity perception is related to their willingness to adopt pro-environmental behaviors and their openness to new sustainable technologies. Regression analyses demonstrate that the anticipated future unavailability of resources is more crucial for predicting pro-environmental behavior than the perceived current resource availability. The expected reduced future availability of natural resources goes along with increased openness to sustainable energy (r energy = − 0.32) and food technologies (r food = − 0.22). Moreover, a t-test provides evidence for the causal influence of scarcity perception by showing that pro-environmental behavior was higher following our scarcity salience manipulation (Cohen's d = 0.27). Further bootstrapping analyses showed that the salience affected individuals' technology openness via pro-environmental behavior. Also, pro-environmental behavior and openness to sustainable food and energy technologies were amplified when people believed that fewer resources will be available due to an increased concern about scarcity.
... However, the insights are waiting for being stumbled across by a research manager in an established company. Because the technologists have not enough experiences to evaluate the business opportunities [17]. One method to improve the training process is that the cooperation between the training process and the management activities of companies should be strengthened. ...
... From view of innovation management, a typical innovation process includes opportunity search, opportunity recognition, opportunity evaluation and implementation [17][18][19]. In step 4 engineers attending training classes must identify an inventive problem or a project which is identical to target of opportunity search of the typical innovation process. ...
... The key step for a successful innovation in a company is opportunity recognition [17][18][19]. There are many studies in literatures in management domain but few in engineering. ...
Many design engineers in cross-domain industries have attended training classes of TRIZ to improve their innovative abilities in China. Most of them are successful, but others are not. So the latest target of the trainers is to improve the training process used now in industry in China and to make the engineers to understand the basic principles of TRIZ better. Based on the mass-engineer-oriented training model (MEOTM) and mechanical engineers’ design cases, a relationship between managing activities about the opportunities for innovation and the training process is set up. It is shown that the inventive problems come first from opportunity searching for engineers. A training and gate system for evaluation is developed to involve the managing activities of the companies in the training process. Then comparison between the general analogous process and the application of TRIZ is made, which shows the advantages and depth principles of TRIZ for the engineers to apply them confidently. Lastly a new process is formed in which opportunity searching, engineers training, inventive problems identifying and solving,and three redesign paths are connected seamlessly. The research proposes an opportunity-driven redesign path that cooperates the training and opportunity searching, which will be applied in future training classes to make more and more engineers to follow.
... New technologies are constantly being developed to accelerate economic development. Korhonen (2018) says that we are able to overcome the shortage of mineral resources thanks to innovations and technologies. Will technological progress overcome the shortcomings that the future may bring? ...
Copper and aluminium prices have long been influenced mainly by non-renewable resources and the industry's widespread use of copper and aluminium for their desired properties. Metal commodities are irreplaceable for the industry of developed countries, and their shortage in the covid times also increases the price and consequently the price of products made from them. As copper ore stocks continue to decline, suitable substitutes should be sought. The paper discusses the potential of copper substitution by aluminium and subsequently the development of prices and production of copper and aluminium, including a prediction about the future development. Research data were obtained from Market. business insider (2021) and Investing.com (2022) converted to time series. The price is shown in US dollars per tonne and the production value in millions of tonnes. Development data were processed using artificial intelligence and recurrent neural networks, including the Long Short Term Memory layer. Neural networks, as such, have great potential to predict these types of time series. The annual copper and aluminium production data were processed using a regression function. Neural networks could not be used due to the smaller data range. The results show that the 1NN30L neural network with an LSTM layer and considered a 30-day delay is the most suitable network for forecasting future copper prices, and the 3NN30L neural network with an LSTM layer and considered a 30-day delay is the most suitable network for forecasting future aluminium prices. The forecast has confirmed that the price of copper will fall at the end of 2021, and the trend will be constant in the next planned period. Aluminium will also fall sharply at the end of 2021; at the beginning of 2022, the price level is predicted to rise to that of 30 October 2021, and thereinafter the trend will be almost constant. Research has confirmed that copper and aluminium may be imperfect substitutes in some respect, but they can generally be considered complementary. Copper mining has stabilised in recent years, but aluminium production has increased significantly in the last decade, and it can be expected to grow in the near future.
... In this regard, the OECD estimates that infrastructure development in the business-as-usual approach will cause the unsustainable rise in both energy demand (85%) and water consumption (55%) resulting in a potential shortage of global energy and water supply [45]. Furthermore, financial gap for the necessary development [46], global population growth [47], resource scarcity [48], and climate change [49] will require a paradigm shift towards consequent development of sustainable infrastructure [10]. To this end, alternative financial models and mobilizing domestic resources are required to support sustainable infrastructure development [50,51]. ...
This study investigates the causal relationship between public investment and sovereign debt (i.e., external and domestic public debt) with respect to the limits of public-debt sustainability for four countries with the highest GDP (i.e., the United States, China, Japan, Germany) during the period of 2000–2015. In summary, this study establishes quantitative evidence based on empirical findings to support the claim that sovereign debt is harmful to the financing of public infrastructure if it breaches certain thresholds, as proposed in this study, and according to the literature. By this approach, the findings enable us to make recommendations about the need for mobilizing domestic resources and innovating new financial models to promote sustainable development within the limits of sustainable public debt. In short, this paper concludes that performing a project for sustainable development by implementing unsustainable financing models will always end up with unsustainable economic outcomes.
Ceramics are considered one of the greatest and earliest most useful successes of humankind. However, ceramics can be highly damaging to natural and social systems during their lifecycle, from material extraction to waste handling. For example, each year in the EU, the manufacture of ceramics (e.g., refractories, wall and floor tiles and bricks and roof tile) emit 19 Mt CO2, while globally, bricks manufacturing is responsible for 2.7% of carbon emissions annually. This critical and systematic review seeks to identify alternatives to mitigate the climate effects of ceramics products and processes to make their lifecycle more sustainable. This article reviews 324 studies to answer the following questions: what are the main determinants of energy and carbon emissions emerging from the ceramics industry? What benefits will this industry amass from adopting more low-carbon processes in manufacturing their products, and what barriers will need to be tackled? We employ a sociotechnical approach to answer these questions, identify barriers to decarbonise the ceramics industry, and present promising avenues for future research. In doing so, we show that environmental and energy challenges associated with the ceramics industry are not just limited to the manufacturing stage but also relate to the extraction of raw materials, waste disposal, and landfilling.
To improve metal utilization efficiency, the effects of technical change cannot be ignored. However, existing researches often ignored the heterogeneous effects of different types of technical change on metal consumption intensity. Taking the G7 and BRICS countries as samples, this article first identifies the direct effects of heterogeneous technical change on the consumption intensity of iron ores, copper and aluminum from magnitude of technical change (MTC) and biased technical change (BTC). Then, industrial structure and metal consumption are introduced as mediating variables to identify the indirect effects of heterogeneous technical change. The results show the following: (1) there is a lag in the effect of TC on reducing metal consumption intensity and its effect on iron ore consumption intensity is the most significant. Reduction of iron ore consumption intensity mainly depends on MTC, whereas the reduction of copper and aluminum consumption intensity mainly depends on BTC. (2) The effects of heterogeneous technical change on metal consumption intensity in BRICS countries were consistent with the overall samples, while the effects of BTC on the intensity of copper and aluminum are positive in G7 countries. (3) Three types of technical change can reduce metal consumption intensity through the rationalization and advancement of industrial structure, and their effects are heterogeneous for different metals. (4) TC and BTC cannot reduce metal consumption intensity through reducing metal consumption due to a rebound effect, whereas MTC can significantly reduce iron ore consumption intensity by reducing iron ore consumption.
Our aim in this essay is to identify and analyze some of the difficulties with interdisciplinary integration of economic and ecological contributions to the study of biodiversity loss. We develop our analysis from a widely accepted definition of economics which is based on the concept of scarcity. Taking a closer look at this notion, we find that economics actually limits itself to a very particular aspect of scarcity, which we denote as relative scarcity. We describe in what respect the economic approach towards biodiversity is based on this notion, and also reflect on the specific understanding of the relation of humans and nature behind the economic approach. We then turn to absolute scarcity as another notion of scarcity, and show that this is not within the scope of economics, but has been a theme of ecology and ecological economics. We describe in which way ecological and ecological–economic approaches towards biodiversity are based on the idea of absolute scarcity, and also reflect on the specific understanding of the human–nature relationship behind this notion of scarcity. Against this background, we discuss the roles of economics and ecology for nature conservation. We conclude that the interdisciplinary integration of ecology and economics requires a philosophical underpinning, and suggest a framework for further research.
Stuart Kauffman here presents a brilliant new paradigm for evolutionary biology, one that extends the basic concepts of Darwinian evolution to accommodate recent findings and perspectives from the fields of biology, physics, chemistry and mathematics. The book drives to the heart of the exciting debate on the origins of life and maintenance of order in complex biological systems. It focuses on the concept of self-organization: the spontaneous emergence of order widely observed throughout nature. Kauffman here argues that self-organization plays an important role in the emergence of life itself and may play as fundamental a role in shaping life's subsequent evolution as does the Darwinian process of natural selection. Yet until now no systematic effort has been made to incorporate the concept of self-organization into evolutionary theory. The construction requirements which permit complex systems to adapt remain poorly understood, as is the extent to which selection itself can yield systems able to adapt more successfully. This book explores these themes. It shows how complex systems, contrary to expectations, can spontaneously exhibit stunning degrees of order, and how this order, in turn, is essential for understanding the emergence and development of life on Earth. Topics include the new biotechnology of applied molecular evolution, with its important implications for developing new drugs and vaccines; the balance between order and chaos observed in many naturally occurring systems; new insights concerning the predictive power of statistical mechanics in biology; and other major issues. Indeed, the approaches investigated here may prove to be the new center around which biological science itself will evolve. The work is written for all those interested in the cutting edge of research in the life sciences.
