Designing Transitions Through Projects: The Project Transition Canvas as a Tool for Systemic Change

The ecological transition has evolved from a global policy commitment into an operational imperative driving technological, organizational, and societal transformation across sectors. Within this context, energy transition can be understood as a socio-technical process in which innovation emerges through the interaction between technological change and systemic adaptation. Projects play a pivotal role in this process, acting as niches—protected spaces where sustainable technologies and practices can be developed, tested, and potentially scaled up to influence incumbent regimes. Building on this perspective, the paper introduces the Project Transition Canvas (PTC), a conceptual tool designed to map and evaluate the contribution of individual projects to broader sustainability transitions. The PTC supports project promoters and policymakers in visualizing how a project’s innovative features interact with the existing socio-technical system. That integrates project management thinking with transition theory. By bridging the gap between project-level innovation and system-level transformation, the paper contributes to the ongoing debate on how projects can become active enablers of sustainable transitions, providing a foundation for future empirical testing and refinement of the model.