Better and faster decision-making regarding transitions

Transitions crucial for society

Transitions are major system changes and require technological and societal innovations (behaviour, rules, forms of organisation). And these demand a lot from the parties involved. To tackle societal issues, transitions are necessary.

For example, a transition to a circular economy is needed to prevent environmental pollution. If we want to deal with the ageing of the Dutch population, then healthcare must be modernised. If we want to achieve the climate targets, we must radically change our energy supply. These are just a few examples of the challenges we face.

TNO facilitates better decision-making

We at TNO want to help achieve these societal goals. And given the important role of decision-making in this, we want to support the decision-making process.

Within the energy transition key decision makers include government, businesses, grid operators, and energy suppliers. We want to improve the ability of decision-makers to make decisions that enable transitions. To do this, decision-makers must have relevant knowledge, understand systemic relationships, and be able to develop a strategy. To this we contribute with the development of the following:

• We make useful knowledge available to actors and decision-makers. This involves knowledge about technology, the system, its social environment, and relationships. This provides insight into current and future opportunities to change the system.
• We make the relationships between individual decisions visible. One person's decision affects another's. Better alignment of these decisions will allow for a systemic change.
• Finally, we support decision-makers in drawing up a joint strategy. This strategy contains the choices for a desired system and which decisions, in what order, must be made by whom.

We are making good strides in developing this process. A good practical example is our advice report to the Lower House on energy infrastructures (only in Dutch available) (pdf).