2022/10 | LEM Working Paper Series | ||||||||||||||||
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Knowing brown and inventing green? Incremental and radical innovative activities in the automotive sector |
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Julia Mazzei, Tommaso Rughi and Maria Enrica Virgillito |
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Keywords | |||||||||||||||||
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Low emission vehicles; relatedness; diversification; knowledge.
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JEL Classifications | |||||||||||||||||
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O33, O34, Q55, L62
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Abstract | |||||||||||||||||
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The development of low emission vehicles (LEVs) in the automotive sector stands out in the literature
as a typical case of technological competition between a dominant design and a set of alternative green
technologies. The incremental trajectory of green technologies aimed at improving the efficiency of the
internal combustion engine (ICEG) is competing with a radical trajectory targeted to the development
of hybrid, electric and fuel cell vehicles (HEF). Exploiting a novel dataset of firm- and patent-level
information retrieved from ORBIS-IP and containing USPTO patent applications between 2001 and
2018 in the automotive sector, we first cluster firms according to their relative patent share and degree of
specialization in each trajectory, identifying a technological landscape in which they locate with distinct
strategies. We then investigate the extent to which different stocks and combinations of knowledge
might explain such heterogeneity in innovative efforts and positioning in the landscape. Our results
suggest that a stock of ''brown'' knowledge closely related to ''green'' knowledge proves to be valuable
for firm's success in each trajectory. Moreover, firms with a broad array of different knowledge sources
are capable of reaching a leadership position in the technological landscape.
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