Gianluca Orsatti

Achieving net-zero emissions alongside sustained economic growth necessitates unprecedented innovation efforts. Demand is a pivotal driver. This paper presents novel evidence concerning the relationship between public procurement for green products and services (GPP) and firm innovation. GPP widens market niches for new green goods and accelerates the adaptation of conventional goods to meet more rigorous environmental standards. This, in turn, fosters the creative response of the firm, stimulating innovation in both new green products and new green processes. The empirical analysis focuses on US publicly listed innovative companies from 2004 to 2016. The results demonstrate that increases in GPP stimulate green innovation overall, particularly process-related. Moreover, we observe that this is more pronounced in larger and older firms, as well as in those endowed with substantial knowledge and organizational capital. These results provide valuable insights for designing effective policy frameworks to expedite the green transition while ensuring economic growth.

The new evidence provided by the codification of intangible assets in national accounts and firm statistics provides the opportunity to test the Schumpeterian creative response hypothesis according to which (i) the generation and exploitation of knowledge are characterized by high levels of risk, (ii) firms in equilibrium are reluctant to undertake risky activities, (iii) the farther away from equilibrium conditions, the stronger the firm’s willingness to introduce innovation, (iv) the creative response effect is heterogeneous across firm size, age, and industry technological content. Empirical evidence for publicly listed companies in the US during 1977–2016 confirms a U-shaped relationship between out-of-equilibrium performance and intangible intensity growth. Moreover, we estimate a deeper U-shaped relationship between performance and growth in intangibles intensity for small and young firms and, on average, for firms in high-tech industries. Our results are robust to different econometric tests performed on alternative samples. An original instrumental variable strategy further strengthens the validity of our results. We conclude that the firm creative response is an out-of-equilibrium phenomenon, stronger in the case of disappointing performances and sharper for small, young, and high-tech firms.

This paper delves into the proliferation of non-practicing entities (NPEs), a hot topic in academia and public policy, especially in the United States. The common belief is that Europe is less exposed to NPEs due to a robust patent system, higher enforcement costs, and smaller damage awards. Yet, using a new database of NPE patent applications at the European Patent Office (EPO), the study uncovers that NPEs activity in Europe is arising: they own nearly 20,000 EPO patents, primarily in Electrical Engineering. Moreover, we contribute the literature investigating the heterogeneity of the NPE business model and its relationship with the characteristics and use of the patents they target. Our econometric analysis provides threefold original evidence. First, NPEs with higher propensity for litigation (i.e., “Litigation” NPEs) acquire patents with higher infringement risk but similar technological quality than practicing entities. Second, patent aggregators (i.e., “Portfolio” NPEs) and technology companies (i.e., “Technology” NPEs) acquire higher-quality patents compared to those acquired by practicing entities. Third, patent acquisitions by “Litigation” NPEs and “Portfolio” NPEs reduce the subsequent use of protected technologies.

We study the entry of regions in new green technological specializations, specifically investigating the role of recombinant novelty and academic inventors and the interplay between the two. We conduct an empirical analysis on a panel of Italian NUTS-3 regions observed from 1999 to 2009. The results show that both recombinant novelty and the presence of academic inventors are positively associated with new entries in green technological specializations, and that their interaction provides a compensatory mechanism in regions lacking adequate novel combinatorial capabilities. The findings of this study are relevant for policymakers involved in the elaboration of successful regional specialization strategies in green technological domains.

Using data on green patents filed at the European Patent Office from 1980 to 1984, this paper investigates the effect of increasing government R&D budget on green technology spillovers. Spillovers are measured with patent forward citations over the period 1981–1988. The level of government R&D budget is instrumented leveraging the unexpected occurrence of the Chernobyl nuclear accident—that exogenously pushed governments to reduce their energy-related R&D budgets—in a difference in differences setting. 2SLS results show that a 10% increase in government R&D increases by some 0.7% the number of citations received by green patents. Although positive and significant, the small magnitude of the estimated elasticity suggests that government R&D takes time to let innovation spillovers from green technologies to materialize with some relevance. Interestingly, increasing government R&D expenditures fosters green technology spillovers across traditional (non-green) fields and enlarges the technological breadth of inventions citing green patents. Overall, I conclude that government R&D fosters green knowledge spillovers, accelerates hybridization processes and favors technological diversification around green technologies. However, these positive effects seem to materialize at a slow pace.

This paper deals with the determinants of technological novelty at the local level and, in particular, with the impact of the local endowment of key enabling technologies (KETs). Looking at local innovations as recombinations of pre-existing knowledge, we argue that the local endowment of KETs facilitates regions introducing inventions with novel technological origins, either in absolute or in relative terms. We test for this argument by focusing on a sample of 1,255 EU (NUTS3) regions over the 2000–2014 period and propose an original instrumental variable strategy that allows us to maintain the local endowment of KETs as exogenous. The results confirm our main hypotheses. In particular, a 1% increase in KETs increases by ∼1.8% the number of novel patents generated at the local level. KETs therefore appear to be ‘enabling’ of technological innovations that are unique in recombination across the board. However, KETs promote ‘new-to-the-region’ innovations more than ‘new-to-the-world’ innovations, representing a policy leverage to which regions could resort in targeting the local replication of technological advancements already present at the global frontier for some time.