Transition towards a green economy in Europe: Innovation and knowledge integration in the renewable energy sector

Abstract

A major concern regarding innovation in clean technologies in the EU is that the fragmentation of its innovation system may hinder knowledge flows and, consequently, spillovers across member countries. A low intensity of knowledge flows across EU states can negatively impact their technological base, suppressing opportunities for further innovations and hindering the movement towards the technological frontier. This paper evaluates the fragmentation of the EU innovation system in the field of renewable energy sources (RES) by examining the intensity and direction of knowledge spillovers over the years 1985-2010. We modify the original double exponential knowledge diffusion model to provide information on the degree of integration of EU countries' innovation efforts and to assess how citation patterns changed over time. We show that EU RES inventors have increasingly built "on the shoulders of the other EU giants", intensifying their citations to other member countries and decreasing those to domestic inventors. Furthermore, the EU strengthened its position as source of RES knowledge for the US. Finally, we show that this pattern is peculiar to RES, with other traditional (i.e. fossilbased) energy technologies behaving in a completely different way.

Exploring the Effects of Government Policies on Economic Performance: Evidence Using Panel Data for Korean Renewable Energy Technology Firms

“…Such efforts should consider limited financial resources [58,59], uncertainty concerning technological prospect regarding R&D costs and eventual performance [60][61][62][63], uncertainty about the demand and preferences of different customer groups regarding the characteristics of RETs [60,61,64,65], concerns over spillovers, accumulated technological knowledge, and practical know-how that firms possess by conducting innovation activities. Other firms could freely use these resources to develop their technology and productivity [66][67][68][69][70][71], which are the main reasons for the difficulty in fully utilizing innovation potential by firms in the RET sector. Despite government policies as a catalyst to promote firms' innovation, herd behavior derived from government subsidies can promote overinvestment, which is likely to negatively affect firms' growth without improving profitability due to the deterioration of their capital structure.…”

Place-dependence of renewable energy technologies

“…Emerging technologies like clean energy technologies evolve in interactions between different knowledge and other resources from different technologies in different countries (Carlsson and Stankiewicz, 1991;Hekkert et al, 2007). Both inter-technology knowledge spillovers (Battke et al, 2016;Nemet, 2012;Stephan et al, 2019) and international knowledge spillovers play an important role in the development of renewable energy technologies (Conti et al, 2018;Garrone et al, 2014;Verdolini and Galeotti, 2011;Wu and Mathews, 2012).…”

“…Countries benefit from these international knowledge spillovers when developing new technologies (Mancusi, 2008;Malerba et al, 2013). International knowledge spillovers are especially important for producing knowledge in renewable energy technologies (Conti et al, 2018;Garrone et al, 2014;Verdolini and Galeotti, 2011;Wu and Mathews, 2012). Countries can utilize international knowledge to reduce their energy R&D investments (Bosetti et al, 2008).…”

“…Knowledge development processes in emerging TISs often bridge technological and/or geographical distance to bring together and recombine knowledge originating in different TISs and NISs (Arthur, 2007;Henderson and Clark, 1990). This is particularly true for renewable energy technologies: First, renewable energy technologies are considered as complex technologies which require knowledge input from various technologies (Barbieri et al, 2020;Malhotra et al, 2019;Nemet, 2012); Second, knowledge in renewable energy technologies is unevenly distributed across countries (Conti et al, 2018;Sbardella et al, 2018). Thus, a proper analysis of the knowledge flows in global renewable energy innovation systems has to take into account both technological and geographical dimensions.…”

“…Both knowledge flows between TISs (Battke et al, 2016;Malhotra et al, 2019;Nemet, 2012;Stephan et al, 2019) and international knowledge flows (Conti et al, 2018;Verdolini and Galeotti, 2011;Wu and Mathews, 2012) are found to be important for the development of renewable energy technologies. While the recent literature on global innovation systems acknowledge these multi-scalar knowledge dynamics (Binz and Truffer, 2017;Martin, 2016;Weber and Truffer, 2017), there is a lack of systematic evidence on how different knowledge flows between TISs and NISs influence future knowledge development in global renewable energy innovation systems.…”