A rationale for public intervention in disruptive technological development: public policy tools as trust-enabling mechanisms.
Résumé
This paper discusses how actors engage in knowing, testing and developing a new technology option in a situation of uncertainty about its potentialities. We demonstrate that two kinds of trust-enabling mechanisms help actors cope with the uncertainty: promise-securing mechanisms and judgement-enabling mechanisms. Our central argument is that public policy tools can play the role of such trust-enabling mechanisms. By analysing the attempt to change the paradigm in the electronic industry based on Moore's law from a clock to a clockless design, we show that they enabled key stages to unfold: building a community of interest around a common language and conventions, fostering exploration in specific frameworks, and developing collaborative projects around demonstrators up until the determination of a standard and the setting-up of the infrastructures.