Diversity in technology competition: The link between platforms and sociotechnical transitions

•I develop a model of technology evolution.•It describes competition of incumbent and new technologies.•It represents technological diversity and spatial differentiation.•It studies time to realize a full transition to new technologies.•Transition time increases with the number of technologies, and spatial dispersion.

There is an urgent need for a fast transition to a low-carbon economy, which will involve behavioural change and new technologies. This paper focuses on the technological dimension of the transition. Low-carbon technologies usually have a modular architecture that utilize standards to enable interfacing of components. These standards contribute to transition inertia. An important question addressed in this article is whether maintaining technological diversity can help overcome inertia. This requires keeping options open and foregoing returns to scale. It is a trade-off which has technological as well as spatial dimensions which are important because different geographical areas may provide institutional or other advantages to the emergence of distinct technologies. In order to explore this, the platform competition and transitions literature are reviewed, links between them are established, and a system dynamics model is developed where multiple new technologies compete with an incumbent. It is used to answer two questions: Will a larger portfolio accelerate or delay a transition to a new technology, and under which conditions will such an acceleration occur? does spatial differentiation matter to the outcome? The model results show that technological diversity and spatial differentiation matter for the speed of transitions. The challenge is to create a level competitive field for all technologies accounting for the distinct institutional advantages their spatial differentiation may provide. This opens a range of future research directions.