TY - JOUR

T1 - Geography and the speed of green technology diffusion

AU - Losacker, Sebastian

AU - Horbach, Jens

AU - Liefner, Ingo

N1 - Funding Information: Previous versions of this article were presented at the 6 NEST Conference in April 2021, at the RSA Regions in Recovery Global e-Festival in June 2021 and at the 12 IST Conference in October 2021. An earlier version of this article received the best paper award at the RSAI-GSSI Workshop on “Regions in-between the green transition and the digital transformation” in June 2021. The authors have benefited greatly from feedback received from the participants of these events, in particular from comments by Hendrik Hansmeier, Claudia Ghisetti and Alberto Marzucchi. Also, we appreciate the reference to the source of licensing data by researchers at the School of Urban & Regional Science, East China Normal University in Shanghai during a research visit in September 2019. Thanks go to Charlotte Lobensteiner and Boshu Li for their excellent research assistance. We acknowledge financial support by the German Research Foundation (DFG). th th

PY - 2023

Y1 - 2023

N2 - A fast adoption and diffusion of green technologies will be essential for a successful transition of the world’s economies towards more sustainable modes of production and consumption. This article investigates the speed of green technology diffusion in China using a unique data set, which lists geocoded patent licence agreements for green technologies from 2000–2019. We focus on the relation between spatial determinants, including geographic proximity and regional technological specialisation, and the time-to-adoption, thus analysing the factors explaining the time between technology development (patent application) and technology adoption (licencing). The main finding is that geographic proximity to the innovator is associated with an accelerated time-to-adoption. Moreover, we find that the more a region specialises in green technologies, the faster a patent is licenced within that region.

AB - A fast adoption and diffusion of green technologies will be essential for a successful transition of the world’s economies towards more sustainable modes of production and consumption. This article investigates the speed of green technology diffusion in China using a unique data set, which lists geocoded patent licence agreements for green technologies from 2000–2019. We focus on the relation between spatial determinants, including geographic proximity and regional technological specialisation, and the time-to-adoption, thus analysing the factors explaining the time between technology development (patent application) and technology adoption (licencing). The main finding is that geographic proximity to the innovator is associated with an accelerated time-to-adoption. Moreover, we find that the more a region specialises in green technologies, the faster a patent is licenced within that region.

KW - China

KW - environmental innovation

KW - green technology

KW - Innovation diffusion

KW - patent licencing

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85132659651&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1080/13662716.2022.2071237

DO - 10.1080/13662716.2022.2071237

M3 - Article

AN - SCOPUS:85132659651

VL - 30

SP - 531

EP - 555

JO - Industry and innovation

JF - Industry and innovation

SN - 1366-2716

IS - 5

ER -