Can a technical innovation system be done before adopting and implementing a technology? How could that happen for sustainable sanitation technologies ?
Article Innovation studies in the 21st century;: Questions from a us...
A technical innovation system can be viewed as soil in which technology implementation can succeed. The components of the system include institutional mechanisms that nurture technology - both its development and implementation. At a national level, these include, inter alia, laws and their enforcement toprotect intellectual property, R&D incentives, fiscal policies and financial institutions to support venture capital, establishing academia-industry networks, etc. At organizational level, they include leadership that rewards innovation and tolerates failure as part of technology decelopment.
No innovation can be completed without being useful to someone. Therefore, it is always a combination between serving a need and having a solution (technology, method, process, etc). If there is a need and you can think of several possible technologies, this may work, but at the end you will have to find the solution that serves best the need and is economical.
My answer to your question would be NO. To be complete, that is a cost-efficient alternative for the intended task; a technology requires a lot of learning to adapt and improve its properties, and to reduce costs. All models of technological and organizational learning show that learning needs implementation to assess and improve the design of a technology. Implementation is a corner building stone in Kim’s seminal paper on the OADI-SMM model for learning (Kim, D.H. (1993), “The Link between Individual and Organizational Learning”, Sloan Management Review, 35: 37-50. OADI-SMM: Observe-Assess-Design-Implement – Shared Mental Model). Espejo et al expands Kim’s model in chapters 6 and 7 in their book on organizational learning (Espejo, R., Schuhmann,W., Schwaninger, M and Bilello, U. (1996) Organizational Transformation and Learning – A Cybernetic Approach to Management, John Wiley & Sons Ltd, Chichester).