Transitioning through a crisis: industrial customer responses to a green technology innovation scheme

Government-driven innovation diffusions have addressed the intersections between technology, the environment and society, with far-reaching implications for both diffusors and adopters. In this paper, we introduce how industrial customers respond to a crisis using a case of a renewable heat incentive scheme that led to an elected government collapse. This crisis exposed institutional breaches, or an absence of functionalities in the scheme’s governance systems. Our findings test and extend the theory of Etzioni (1975) on responses to market crisis conditions: (i) calculative responses during the scheme’s initial diffusion; (ii) strategic responses during the surfacing of institutional breaches; (iii) distrustful responses after customer hardship was not addressed. We contribute a process model of the interaction amongst breaches and responses over time. Overall, this study brings forth insights on industrial customer responses to institutional processes and shows the evolved retorts amidst a crisis. It also identifies diffusion implications for policy makers.