English Abstract This report summarizes the findings of the
MATRIC-project. Matric stands for 'Management of Technology Responses to
the Climate Change Challenge'. The project empirically studied
technological change and innovation to learn more about the contigencies
conditioning and influencing these processes with the aim to recommend
national technology oriented climate change policies. The social
construction of technology implies that processes of technological change
are guided by dynamics of their own, which follow from the way technology
becomes embedded in society. Why and how technology changes is therefore
not only decided by technological artefacts, new ideas about artefacts and
the succes of R&D as the linear models assume, but in fact results from the
dynamic interation between technologies and societal environment in which
they operate. How and why innovations adapt is basically influenced by a
contigent set of selection mechanisms operating in the social environment of
technology. The influence of the societal environment of technological
change and innovation turns out to be much more dexisive and significant
than is assumed by linear models of innovation. This fundamental idea of
social embeddedness of technology has been the analytical point of departure
of Matric project.
