What do we know about Public support for pilot and demonstration facilities?

Experimental activities in pilot- and demonstration plants and projects often play a key role in technological development, not least in industry and the energy sector. This issue is highly topical in the light of the ongoing climate transition and the future competitiveness of industry. Such projects make it possible to scale, optimize and improve the performance of new processes and products.

An important goal of pilot- and demonstration projects is to reduce not only technical and economic risks but also to generate new knowledge in relation to the need for institutional change and partnership between different actors along the value chain.

This report is about the role of the state in such technological development. Even if government support for investment in pilot- and demonstration plants is a common instrument in innovation policy mixes, existing research on the impacts of such support is scarce. The purpose of this report is to synthesize and discuss previous research that has aimed at evaluating the impacts and the implementation of government support to pilot- and demonstration plants and projects.