René Kemp is Professorial fellow at the UNU Maastricht Economic and Social Research Institute on Innovation and Technology (UNU-MERIT) and Professor of Innovation and Sustainable Development at ICIS, Maastricht University.
Formerly he was research director of STEP in Oslo and visiting researcher at IPTS (Seville), Harvard (Boston), Foscari University (Venice), SPRU (Sussex) and CIRUS (Zurich). He held research positions at DRIFT, TNO and Twente University.
René Kemp is well known for his work on eco-innovation, environmental policy, strategic niche management and transition management — on which he authored numerous articles and books. His research interests are environmental policy and technical change, technological transitions, innovation policy, evolutionary theories of technical change and reflexive governance. He is member of the scientific board of ARTEC in Bremen, RIDE in Gothenburg and sits in the NWO programme committee on interdisciplinary energy research. He is editor of the Springer book series "Sustainability and Innovation", and advisory editor of Reseach Policy. For the Dutch government he developed the model of transition management together with Jan Rotmans and, for the Environment Council (meeting of EU Environment Ministers) of July 2004, he wrote a policy note on strategies for eco-efficient innovation that fed into the Council’s conclusions.