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In light of the current climate crisis and pressure on depleted resources, green industrial development is a necessity to improve the sustainability of the environment. Although we have seen a significant increase in the literature dealing with green regional path development, there is still a substantial research gap when it comes to understanding who and what drives different types of the green technological development at the regional level. This article adopts an agency-oriented approach and contributes to the literature by (1) providing a systematic empirical analysis of green regional path development, (2) showing the heterogeneity of green regional path development and (3) the linkages to pre-existing knowledge bases and external knowledge sources, and (4) analyzing the type of inventive actors involved in green regional path development. We use a unique, comprehensive database on green inventors and patent applicants in the Nordic countries. We combine quantitative and qualitative measures to validate an elaborated typology of green regional path development focusing on green path extension, path renewal, path diversification and path creation. Findings reveal that green inventive activity is spatially concentrated in few regions across the Nordic countries characterized by multiple types of path development processes. We find that the majority of green technological development are driven by incumbent firms involved in path extension, renewal and diversification processes, whereas new entrants, although they account for less green inventive activity are mainly involved in path creation processes entailing the largest degree of structural change.

Over the past 10-15 years the bioeconomy has increased in importance and has been promoted as a possible contribution to address important societal challenges such as climate change, food security, and global health issues. It is argued that the development towards a circular bioeconomy can be characterised as a system change as it requires fundamental changes in both production and consumption systems (Coenen, Hansen, and Rekers 2015; Bugge, Hansen, and Klitkou 2016; Scordato, Bugge, and Fevolden 2017). However, even if governments in many countries have started to introduce policies addressing grand societal challenges, it remains unclear how policies can be implemented to achieve determined goals, and also how such policies can be understood in relation to existing policies (Kuhlmann and Rip 2014; OECD 2015; Schot and Steinmueller 2016). Still, we know very little about the extent to which policies are in fact giving sufficient importance to transformative failures (vis-à-vis market and structural failures). Also, to the extent that transformative failures are given attention in bioeconomy policies, we don't know whether this is consistent in the policy mix or only in terms of formulating visions.