From less promising to green? Technological opportunities and their role in (green) ICT innovation

Grazia Cecere,Sascha Rexhäuser,Patrick Schulte

doi:10.1080/10438599.2018.1423766

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article aims to shed light on the role of technological opportunities for green innovation by studying the case of Green ICT innovation. We test whether firms active in low-opportunity technological areas are less likely to be innovative and whether they are more likely to change their direction of technical change. To do so, we construct a firm-level panel data set for the years 1992–2009 combining patent data from the European Patent Office with firm-level data from the German Innovation Panel (Mannheim Innovation Panel). The results are based on dynamic count data estimation models applying General Methods of Moments estimators. Our results support our hypotheses: firms active in low-opportunity technological areas are less innovative but are more likely to switch from pure ICT innovation to Green ICT innovation.

Highlights

Innovation in environment-friendly, ’green’, technologies is crucial to ensure sustainable growth
To implement our study empirically, we construct a firm-level panel data set for the years 1992-2009 which combines information on patents from the European Patent Office (EPO) and data from the German Innovation Panel (Mannheim Innovation Panel)
In specification (1) it is the number of all information and communication technologies (ICT) patents, in specification (2) it is the number of Green ICT patents and in specification (3) it is the number of pure ICT patents, i.e. the number of non-green ICT patents

Summary

Introduction

Innovation in environment-friendly, ’green’, technologies is crucial to ensure sustainable growth. Jaffe and Palmer, 1997; Newell et al, 1999; Brunnermeier and Cohen, 2003; Popp, 2002; Johnstone et al, 2010). Some evidence with respect to the role of path dependencies for green innovation exists (Acemoglu et al, 2012; Aghion et al, forthcoming; Rexhäuser and Löschel, 2015), but there is nearly no empirical work which examines the role of technological opportunities for green innovation. We provide such evidence to help closing this gap in the literature. Technological opportunities, which describe the ease of innovative activities in a tech-

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Conclusion