In the new paradigm of ‘transformative’ or ‘mission-oriented’ innovation policy, which addresses broad societal challenges, policy makers are given a large responsibility for setting or shaping the direction of socio-technical transitions. However, the literature has so far not provided much concrete advice on how to achieve directionality in practice. The main argument of this conceptual article is that a more detailed approach is needed to better understand the challenges policy makers might face when they attempt to translate societal goals into more concrete and actionable policy agendas. It identifies and discusses eight analytically derived directionality challenges: handling goal conflicts, defining system boundaries, identifying realistic pathways, formulating strategies, realising destabilisation, mobilising relevant policy domains, identifying target groups, and accessing intervention points. To illustrate these challenges, the article uses examples from the implementation of the Swedish climate goal in the process industry.

This paper addresses the role of incumbent firms in driving transitions that entail multiple sectors, conditioned by multiple regimes. We analyse the case ‘HYBRIT’, a radical innovation venture championed by three incumbents from the steel and energy regimes. We investigate what conditions the incumbents’ agency and how they enacted their agency targeting restructuring of the regime elements–actors, institutions, and materiality. We find that eight endogenous and exogenous factors coincide and condition the incumbents’ agency, from which they act in a novel direction of change. We contribute by showing how the collaboration within and across regimes enabled the accomplishment of actions that would have been challenging for individual incumbents to achieve alone. In this setting of scale-intensive industries, incumbents have characteristics that give them a significantly larger capacity to stimulate change than newcomers. The timing and combination of endogenous and exogenous factors, enabling incumbents to collectively drive a transition.