Hopes, hypes and disappointments: Lessons from mobile fuel cell technology

Expectations may have a decisive impact on the pace and direction of technology development. They guide strategic decisions of actors, they legitimize the allocation of resources, they motivate actors to engage in promising innovation fields and they serve to co-ordinate heterogeneous actor groups. Ex-pectations and particularly socially shared expectations on innovative technologies are often subject to impressive dynamics. A typical example is hype-disappointment cycles: expectations get widely ac-cepted and continue to rise for a period of time, but then break down rather suddenly. In this project we want to empirically analyse and illustrate these mechanisms in the case of mobile fuel cells. Mobile fuel cells as a vehicle propulsion system represent a worthwhile focus for two rea-sons. Firstly, they have received quite a high level of attention recently. Secondly, they represent a rather radical innovation in the field of automotive vehicle technology since they break with the hith-erto dominant combustion engine technology and all its related support systems and infrastructures as prime movers in automotive vehicle. The role of expectations for innovation processes is all the more important, if radical innovations are concerned and the uncertainty is high. Moreover, additional un-certainty for the actors involved is created by the expected rise in prices for fossil fuels, by the climate change debate and by growing concerns about the security of supply. The proposed project aims at improving the understanding of the formation and dynamics of socially shared expectations and their influence on the introduction of new technologies in society. The project progresses in three analytical steps: First, expectation dynamics will be retraced by analysing the at-tention mobile fuel cells received in specific arenas, i.e. professional journals, mass media, scientific publications and capital markets. Secondly, the interaction between expectations and innovation proc-esses will be analysed at three levels, largely based on expert interviews: a) we will examine the inter-faces and sites where actor groups specify and exchange expectations (foresight departments, media, conferences etc.); b) we will analyse the role of expectations in the formulation of innovation strate-gies of selected actors; c) we will examine the impact of expectations on the actual innovation proc-esses by focusing on specific innovation projects. Thirdly, on the basis of our empirical results we aim at testing our generalised hypotheses on expectation dynamics and their influence on innovation. We will draw on evidence from different fields of social science based innovation research, mainly science and technology studies, innovation economics and financial behaviour. The project will thereby contribute to an emerging interdisciplinary research field dealing with social dynamics of ex-pectations and innovation. Our results may also serve societal actors to deal more reflexively with so-cial dynamics of expectations and their relevance for innovation processes.

Hypes and disappointed expectations can be observed frequently with regard to alternative propulsion systems. Already in the beginning of the 1990s electric vehicles were expected to overcome the internal combustion engine and the US state of California obliged the large car manufacturers to produce a certain share of zero emission vehicles. Non compliance to the legislation would result in severe fines. During this time a number of electric vehicles, the GM EV1 being probably the most famous one, were developed and deployed to the market by several car manufacturers. However, only a few years later, electric vehicles were regarded as a failure and expectations about bio-fuels became very optimistic until fuel cell technology was expected in the 1990s to be deployed to the market within a short period of time. At the moment expectations and media coverage for fuel cell technology is moderate again, while battery electric vehicles raise a lot of interest. From a scientific, as well as technology policy oriented perspective within the project the question was raised why these hypes and subsequent periods of disappointment repeat itself and how decision makers in science, policy and industry could deal more reflexively with such hypes. Such expectation dynamics raise a twofold challenge: On the one hand investments should not be misdirected to hyped technologies; on the other hand actors should not delay or lose the research and development race in future key technologies. The project "Hopes, hypes and disappointments: Lessons from mobile fuel cell technology" of the AIT focuses on the aforementioned expectation dynamics (from hypes to periods of disappointment) and the reasons for their emergence. The issue itself has been raised for a number of years by decision makers in Research, Technology and Innovation (RTI) policy as well in relation with research and technology management, for instance in research organizations or private companies. The project focuses on the reasons behind the emergence and the impacts of such expectation dynamics in the case of fuel cell technology. In order to do so a number of different methods were applied, for instance interviews with actors from different parts of the society, an analysis of different discourses respectively media (mass media, science journals, financial media, policy debate, professional journals). The analysis of different discourses revealed that in all of the discourses mentioned above, a kind of hype could be observed. Therefore we can conclude that hypes about new technologies are not only a mass media phenomenon. Nevertheless we could observe that the interest for fuel cell technology and the intensity of the hype as well as the disappointment varied across the different discourses. Furthermore our analysis shows that hypes about technologies are not only caused by inflated technological expectations as such, but by the interplay of expectations at different levels. The results of discourse analysis show that the hype around fuel cells was not only caused by technological expectations concerning fuel cell technology as such. In the case of fuel cells, the linking of expectations about the future performance of the technology and the - at the time - very popular vision of a hydrogen economy was spurring expectations about both, fuel cells and the hydrogen economy. Furthermore the vision of a hydrogen economy was linked by its proponents with higher level expectations about renewable energies, for instance photovoltaic or wind energy, since hydrogen can be produced from that sources (but as well from nuclear energy, coal or gas). The hydrogen economy in turn was considered to be desirable since it was expected to offer a solution to future societal challenges such as climate change, resource scarcity or the increasing air pollution. Only the linkage of expectations (about fuel cells itself, hydrogen economy, climate change, resource scarcity, air pollution) made the fuel cell hype at the end of the 1990s possible. This result shows that, the analysis and assessment technologies and their future role has to go beyond the analysis of technological expectations as such, and has to take into account expectations at different levels. In order to do so a concept to distinguish and analyse the linkages and networks of expectations has been developed.