Andrew McMeekin is Professor of Innovation at the Sustainable Consumption Institute (SCI) and Alliance Manchester Business School. Between 2013 and 2018, he was Research Director of the SCI and before that Deputy Director of the ESRC, Scottish Government and Defra funded Sustainable Practices Research Group. Prior to this he was Research Fellow and Senior Research Fellow at the ESRC Centre for Research on Innovation and Competition (CRIC). Before starting at CRIC, he worked at the Manchester School of Management, UMIST, on research into the management of innovation. During this time he completed a doctorate on the relationship between innovation, demand and environmental sustainability. He also studied for an MSc in technology management at the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) at Sussex University.

Andrew is interested in long-term processes of socio-technical change. Recent and current  projects focus on: 1) low carbon pathways for whole system reconfiguration, especially in the electrcity and mobility domains; 2) urban socio-technical tarnsformations for sustainable futures. In realtion to the second theme, I am currently Co-Investigator of a large ESRC research project on "Digital Platforms and the Future of Urban Mobility".

More broadly, I have longer term interests in exploring a 'whole system' reconfiguration perspective to sociotechnical change. I believe the distinctiveness of this agenda rests on four core elements: 1) a broadening of focus to consider the (interdependent) dynamics of innovations across production and consumption; 2) a model of system innovation through gradual reconfiguration (as a critique of the punctuated equilibrium models that arguably dominate present understanding); 3) configurational comparison of major societal domains, for example: electricity, mobility, housing, food; 4) the logic of sociotechnical system change at different scales – cities, national and international.

My origins in science, technology and innovation studies continues to provide a solid theroetical basis for my research. But, I have also, for some time, sought to extend from the mainstream of innovation studies, by conceptualing connections to: 1) Polanyian ecoomic sociology and notions of variegated economies (which helps to understand how innovation systems are economically and politically instituted beyond the market mode), 2) sociological studies of everyday practices (which helps to understand the relationship between innovation and practices of consumption and how innovations become instantiated into the experince of everyday life) and more recently, 3) urban studies (which helps to understand scale formation as constituent of long term sociotechnical change).