Is small really beautiful? A review of the concept of niches in innovation

ABSTRACT

This article reviews the concept of innovation niches through three categories: strategic niche management (SNM), specialised markets and niches formed as a technology declines. In the literature, innovation niches generate interest from both innovation and marketing perspectives. This review focuses predominately on the former from which the niche types have been adopted and analysed. Mostly, contributions since 1980 have been included, representing the period of academic interest in innovative small firms, while both temporal and locational filters were applied to the study. It is noted that SNM has been proposed as a means to protect potentially useful innovations from full market competition, while specialist niches supply technologies to few customers in more stable environments. Incumbent technologies at the stage of decline may also retreat to niches where they can still remain competitive. Finally, it is suggested that further research on innovation niches would extend our understanding of technology dynamics.

KEYWORDS:

• Innovation niches
• strategic niche management
• specialised technologies
• technology decline

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Dr Anne-Marie Coles is Senior Lecturer in Strategic Management in the Department of Systems Management and Strategy at Greenwich University Business Faculty. She currently leads the Sustainability, Technology and Innovation Research group (STIR). Her research interests lie in identification of strategic positioning within complex international innovation networks, with a particular focus on the development of sustainable technologies. Previously she was a founder member of the Brunel Research in Enterprise, Innovation Sustainability and Ethics (BRESE) research centre where she developed a research theme on innovation sustainability and ethics. She has worked on a European funded INTERREG project promoting the use of renewable energy in the UK and France.

Athena Piterou is Senior Lecturer in Sustainability at the University of Greenwich and a Visiting Research Fellow at the Policy Studies Institute, University of Westminster. Past research projects include a study of the emergence of electronic books as a prospective transition pathway in the print-on-paper regime and an examination of community renewable energy in London. She has worked on INTERREG funded projects regarding small business innovation and the promotion of renewable energy in the UK and France.

Anton Sentiċ is Senior Researcher at the International Institute of Management in Technology, University of Fribourg. He completed his PhD at the University of Greenwich. The main focus of his work is on dynamics of sustainable transitions in energy systems as well as sustainable transitions in general. He also engages in research on the connections of sustainable development and food safety and the role of sustainability in fulfilling human needs, and practical applications of CSR in corporate management. Previous work includes several international projects in the waste management sector and research on sustainability management in small and medium enterprises, undertaken at the University of Graz, Austria.