Innovation and Climate Change : the hot Topics in Academic Research

With the effects of climate change growing more apparent, innovation is expected to play a major role in enabling decarbonization processes. Recent developments present both private and public sectors with different technological approaches from low or non-carbon technologies to mitigate sources of greenhouse gases (GHG), to carbon capture and storage innovations to address the consequences of global warming.

In the last years, various factors have created strong incentives for climate change innovation. In 2015 during the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris, twenty countries including the UK, the US, China, and India, committed to double their public investment in low-carbon technology as part of the ‘Mission Innovation’ agreement. In addition, the European Commission has developed a greener carbon-free Europe strategy to support related innovation. At the same time, NGOs and climate activists such as Greta Thunberg, have influenced political agendas around the globe and challenged economic structures and governmental policies grounded in economic growth at the expense of environmental impacts. In the US, a significant policy push for low-carbon technologies has also come some weeks ago from the Biden administration with the Inflation Reduction Act which has been approved by the Congress in August 2022.

At the private sector level, Bill Gates’s Energy Breakthrough Coalition has mobilized investors on breakthrough innovations to address climate change. Finally, for decades academia has been engaged in the development of new technologies. Yet, low-carbon technological progress has been too slow to achieve the temperature goals set by the Paris agreement. A key challenge is thus to understand what combination of factors will help the acceleration of low-carbon innovations and the discontinuation of carbon-intensive ones.

Given that research is expected to help turning challenging problems into manageable solutions, this is an interesting moment to reflect on past insights and cast light on future research on climate change and innovation. This is what I have done recently with some colleagues in the introduction of a special issue of Technovation, a leading academic journal on innovation management, dedicated to “Innovation and Climate Change”.

Main theoretical approaches to Innovation Management

To begin, some broader context of the theoretical approach adopted by climate change related studies published in innovation journals is helpful. The multidisciplinary line of inquiry focusing on innovation, policy, as well as technology management that sit within it, has been heavily influenced by major conceptual approaches. One notable stream of research focuses on innovation systems, with innovation-activities of firms at the centre stage of economic and innovation processes and related systemic contexts supporting, or hindering, innovation capabilities.

Another stream of research has taken a different approach and examined innovation as a transformative process that involves the concurrence of systems of innovation, production and consumption. This approach analyses the emergence and diffusion of new technologies as involving struggles between radical niche-innovations, existing regimes, and macro-contextual ‘landscape’ developments across techno-economic, socio-political, and cultural dimensions.

Such stream of research, known as socio-technical transition studies, has evolved from ‘end-of-pipe technologies’ to ‘clean tech’ to system changes and socio-technical transitions. Transition studies are framed by four core theoretical strands - transition management, strategic niche management, multi-level perspective on socio-technical transitions and technological innovation systems; researchers have used such approaches as framework of analysis for their studies on innovation and climate change.

Most popular papers about Innovation and Climate Change over time

The volume of papers related to Innovation and Climate Change has risen significantly after 2005 and has experienced a sharp increase since 2015 as illustrated in the figure below;

Figure 1. Percentage of papers related to Innovation and Climate Change in top ten Technology Innovation Management journals (1990 – 2021)

The number one cited paper was published in 2007; it examines GHG emission scenarios for climate change mitigation technologies and finds that the energy sector is clearly the largest source of GHG emissions and thus the prime target of emissions reduction. The second most cited paper, published in 2012, deals with policy legitimization processes for long term strategic challenges. The latter adopts a transitions approach to better capture the complexities of transforming systems of innovation, production, and consumption. Many highly cited papers explore the transitions literature and the role of governance, policy, innovation pathways and strategic management. They are referenced in the table below.

Source: Scopus database

Three major areas of research

Three major areas of research are related to Innovation and Climate Change. The figure below shows a network visualization of main research topics related to climate identified by an analysis of the keywords of 877 academic papers related to Innovation and Climate Change. Circles indicate the degree or frequency of the node and the strength of the line.

Fig. 2. Overlay Visualization of authors’ keywords listed at least five time

Excluding generic terms such as innovation, climate change, economics, technology development and sustainable development, three major research clusters stand out, Climate change mitigation (orange) with links to studies related to China, environmental impacts and industrial structures; Empirical analysis (Blue) linked to studies on innovations such as full cells and alternative vehicles and to stakeholders and Sustainability transition (Purple) which connects to studies involving innovation policy and systems, social aspects, etc. . Out of those three clusters there are four important emerging themes that I will cover in my next articles.

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If you are interested with this topic, you will find much more material and ideas in the recent?paper I have published with colleagues titled “Innovation and climate change: A review and introduction to the special issue”.

?You can access it for free at: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0166497222001596?via%3Dihub