Professor René Kemp is an eco-innovation and sustainability transition researcher.
He conducts research into transitions to a circular economy, a low-carbon energy system and the governance of sustainability transitions. He does this from a multidisciplinary perspective with attention to path dependencies, the unruly dynamics of competition and transformation, and institutions & governance as shapers of change and objects of change. For the Dutch government he developed a model of transition management (with Jan Rotmans) and for the province of Limburg and Chemelot he investigates policies for achieving a transition to plastics recycling.
He is advisory editor of Research Policy, editor of Sustainability Science and editor of Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions. At Maastricht University, he co-leads the Maastricht Observatory on Resilient, Responsible & Sustainable Enterprise and Economy (MORSE) and at UNU-MERIT he leads the theme Sustainability and the Green and Circular Economy.
He held research positions at DRIFT, TNO and Twente University and worked at STEP in Oslo (as research director). In 2010, he became professor of Innovation and Sustainable Development at the Maastricht Sustainability Institute.
With a h-index of 84 and more than 40,000 citations to more than 400 publications, René belongs to the top 2% of researchers in the fields of environmental science and innovation studies (https://research.com/u/rene-kemp).
He has published in innovation journals, environmental and ecological economics journals, policy journals, transport and energy journals, sustainable development journals and transition studies journals. He even published an article in a biology journal (Philosophical Transactions – B) about how actors are myopically called in processes of co-evolution.
He likes jazz, reading, cycling and watching football (as fan of PSV Eindhoven).