Faced with the worsening climate threat, industry stakeholders are pressured to undertake the greatest transformation since the first industrial revolution (UNEP, 2017; Schot and Kanger, 2018). The scale and pace of change is particularly disruptive in traditional industry-sectors that usually develop incremental innovations (Lee and Malerba, 2017). The transformative nature of the climate threat creates a need to restructure both the energy mix, general infrastructure, and value constellations in the existng system of industrial production towards sustainable future development. The sustainability transition therefore implies a challenge that calls for system-level coordination of innovation on a near unprecedented scale. However, neither management nor political-economy scholars have developed comprehensive models to analyse disruptive innovation in traditional industries, and there is particularly little research done on disruptive innovation in the context of sustainability (McDowall, 2018; Welter and Baker, 2021). Analysing disruptive innovation in traditional industries set within rigid institutional settings is important to regions and stakeholders looking to catch up and adapt their industries to fast-changing conditions, and transform increasingly quickly in response to climate change (Lema, Fu and Rabellotti, 2020). My thesis participates in this emergent research by asking: How are disruptive innovation processes organised within contexts of large-scale sustainability transition of traditional industries? And furthermore, how are these processes impacted by the Nordic institutional environment? The thesis examines how disruptive innovation processes develop in traditional industry-sectors that are facing pressures to transform in response to climate change, with case-studies in Nordic pioneering ventures in carbon-free hydrogen and steelmaking.

2024

2025