René Kemp is senior research fellow at UNU-MERIT in Maastricht with research positions at ICIS and DRIFT. He is an expert on eco-innovation. Together with Jan Rotmans he developed the model of transition management, which is adopted by the Dutch national government as the model for its sustainability policy. He is member of the programme committee of the interdisciplinary Energy research programme of the Dutch research council NWO (since 2003), editor of Research Policy, and editor of the Springer book series “Sustainability and Innovation”. He is member of scientific board of RIDE (Sweden) and ARTEC (Germany).

He believes that eco-innovation holds great promise for companies. It is driven by economics of resources costs, waste management costs, and environmental demand from society. There are great opportunities in eco-innovation. If the US car industry would have eco-innovated more they would have been in a better position.