Abstract
Recent international climate agreements ask for an acceleration of innovation in climate change mitigation technologies (CCMTs). To design and plan efficient and effective actions, evidence is needed on what has been achieved up to now in terms of technological development. This paper provides an objective and evidence-based overview of the status of global inventiveness in CCMTs. Thanks to a detailed methodological approach, able to capture and exploit the information potential of patent data, this paper proposes a comprehensive analysis to evaluate the global inventive activity. Several indicators are defined and used to measure trajectories of technology development, globalisation of inventions, and networks of collaborations. The study focuses on four major international economies: Europe, China, Japan and USA. Findings show that these major economies have substantially advanced their inventive activity, but continuous and common effort is needed to combat climate change. In particular, the emergence of China as a major economy has been very relevant, since it has opened important market opportunities for incumbent players, but has also introduced competitive restrictions. The degree of internationalisation of CCMT-related activity has increased, as well as the number of collaborations among countries. The comparative analysis of two renewable technologies, solar PV and wind, shows that international inventiveness is technology-dependent and reflects country specialisation. Based on this evidence, international climate agreements need to be further supported to foster clean energy innovation, thereby shaping international collaboration and boosting positive competition.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 100677 |
| Number of pages | 14 |
| Journal | Energy Strategy Reviews |
| Volume | 36 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Jul 2021 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This research summarises authors’ previous patent-related works carried out in the context of the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC) contribution to the Strategic Energy Technologies Information System (SETIS) [104–108]. SETIS monitors and reports on a number of key performance indicators (KPIs) that are instrumental to measure progress made in research and innovation (R&I) and are key drivers in the transition process towards a more secure and sustainable energy systems [109–111]. Among others, SETIS contributes to the Annual State of the Energy Union Report (SOEUR), nonetheless, the results in this paper are not directly comparable with those appearing in SOEUR or in other official European Commission's documents. This is due to differences in the patent dataset, country coverage, reference year and technology aggregations. The author declares no conflict of interest. This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
Funding
This research summarises authors’ previous patent-related works carried out in the context of the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC) contribution to the Strategic Energy Technologies Information System (SETIS) [104–108]. SETIS monitors and reports on a number of key performance indicators (KPIs) that are instrumental to measure progress made in research and innovation (R&I) and are key drivers in the transition process towards a more secure and sustainable energy systems [109–111]. Among others, SETIS contributes to the Annual State of the Energy Union Report (SOEUR), nonetheless, the results in this paper are not directly comparable with those appearing in SOEUR or in other official European Commission's documents. This is due to differences in the patent dataset, country coverage, reference year and technology aggregations. The author declares no conflict of interest. This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
Keywords
- Patent data
- Inventive activity
- Climate change mitigation technologies
- International cooperation
- Network of co-invention
