Restriction lift date: 2029-12-31
Coordinating without convergence: managing product architecture knowledge in emerging energy technologies
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Date
2026-05-20
Authors
Tavares, Alba Francimara Gonçalves
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University College Cork
Published Version
Abstract
After five decades of development, wave energy remains uncommercialised. This is despite technical feasibility and substantial resource potential, e.g. 75% of Ireland's electricity demand could be met from wave energy alone. Unlike solar photovoltaics or other offshore renewable energy (ORE), which have converged around dominant designs that enable economies of scale, wave energy exhibits persistent technological diversity across fundamentally different device concepts. This research investigates how wave energy firms, characteristically small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), manage product-architecture knowledge coordination when technological consensus is absent and market-selection mechanisms provide weak guidance. Qualitative analysis of twelve Irish SMEs in the wave energy sector indicates that recognising architectural innovation requires inter-organisational coordination mechanisms that extend beyond conventional firm capabilities and rely on collective sense-making among various actors. Our contribution is to bridge system-level perspectives, which are already well established in the transitions literature, with the firm-level architectural knowledge tradition, which typically locates architectural recognition within the firm. We identify a management paradox: firms need deployment experience to validate architectural choices, but cannot deploy devices without standards. However, standards require consensus on architectural principles, which also need deployment experience to establish. Our findings connect dominant design theory from firm-centric to system-level analysis, demonstrating that when product architecture knowledge remains distributed across innovation ecosystems, coordination becomes a collective management challenge rather than an individual firm capability. This study contributes to innovation management scholarship by explaining how emerging technologies can stall despite technical maturity when the coordination mechanisms that enable collective architectural recognition remain underdeveloped.
Description
Keywords
Knowledge coordination , Wave energy , Dominant design , Disruptive innovation
Citation
Tavares, A. F. G. 2026. Coordinating without convergence: managing product architecture knowledge in emerging energy technologies. MRes Thesis, University College Cork.