Design and environmental technologies: Does ‘green-matching’ actually help?

Claudia Ghisetti (), Sandro Montresor () and Antonio Vezzani

Research Policy, 2021, vol. 50, issue 5

Abstract: This paper investigates whether a green kind of design helps firms increase their capabilities for inventing in the environmental domain and whether it does so more than ‘standard’ design. It also investigates whether the effect of ‘green-matching’ between new design and technologies is conditional on firms’ innovative capabilities, as reflected by their R&D expenditure. We address these research questions with respect to the world's top R&D investors, looking at their intellectual property rights at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and proposing an original textual identification of green designs and trademarks. We find that green design increases environmental inventions by top R&D investors, and to a greater extent than non-environmental ones. Standard design also stimulates environmental inventions, but to a lesser extent than green design. The ‘green-matching’ actually helps, but internal innovative capabilities are required to make it effective: a green-tech ‘prize’ emerges from green design, but only once a minimum threshold of R&D expenditure has been reached.

Keywords: Eco-innovation; Eco-design; Green technologies; Green-oriented design; R&D (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 O30 O44 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048733321000123
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:respol:v:50:y:2021:i:5:s0048733321000123

DOI: 10.1016/j.respol.2021.104208

Access Statistics for this article

Research Policy is currently edited by M. Bell, B. Martin, W.E. Steinmueller, A. Arora, M. Callon, M. Kenney, S. Kuhlmann, Keun Lee and F. Murray

More articles in Research Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().