The Evolution of the Wind Industry and the Rise of Chinese Firms: From Industrial Policies to Global Innovation Networks

Powered by a growing environmental awareness and the perception of ending fossil-based energy sources, wind energy has evolved as a reliable, mature and increasingly price-competitive alternative to fossil and nuclear energy sources. Along with incremental technological progress, the wind industry, i.e. the development and manufacturing of wind turbines, has developed very dynamically both with respect to organization and location. Originating mainly in small and medium-sized enterprises in a core region of Northern Europe, the wind industry is now a global industry with an increasing significance of Chinese turbine manufacturers. Informed by evolutionary thinking and recent discussions on the concept of path dependence, we will trace this organizational change and geographical shift over time and space. We will show that the development of the wind industry is an example of on-path evolution in which the accumulation of small and incremental change has led to fundamentally new structures. The main drivers of this development have been politics and various types of public policies as well as, more recently, the globalization of knowledge production in global innovation networksthus illustrating the need to better integrate the role of the state and of institutions at multiple levels into evolutionary thinking.