1887

OECD Environment Working Papers

This series is designed to make available to a wider readership selected studies on environmental issues prepared for use within the OECD. Authorship is usually collective, but principal authors are named. The papers are generally available only in their original language English or French with a summary in the other if available.

English

Exploring new metrics to measure environmental innovation

Several efforts have been made to track progress on environmental innovations using very different approaches. However, many lack coverage, granularity, timeliness and may involve high data collection costs, especially when conducted on a large scale. Traditional indicators also overlook commercialised innovation and breakthrough innovation. This issue is particularly relevant for environmental innovation, where scaling-up is considered key to address the climate, biodiversity and pollution crises. The paper reviews potential metrics to measure commercialised climate change-related innovation and to measure breakthrough environmental innovation. By comparing advantages and drawbacks of various options, the paper selects two families of metrics to measure commercialised climate change-related innovation: one based on patent assignments and the other one based on licensing agreements. For breakthrough environmental innovation, the paper concludes that a family of metrics based on venture capital data is currently the most promising option to pursue. The paper then develops the selected new metrics and provides trends in environmental innovation over time, across sectors and when possible across countries. The paper concludes that additional data sources should be explored to extend the application of the proposed new metrics in more countries and consider a more comprehensive set of supports to innovation.

English

Keywords: assignment, green innovation, breakthrough innovation, patent, licensing, innovation metrics, transfer, venture capital
JEL: O31: Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth / Innovation; Research and Development; Technological Change; Intellectual Property Rights / Innovation and Invention: Processes and Incentives; Q55: Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics / Environmental Economics / Environmental Economics: Technological Innovation
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