The role of patent protection in (clean/green) technology transfer

By Bronwyn H Hall, C. Helmers. 2010

114 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Global climate change mitigation will require the development and diffusion of a large number and variety of new technologies. How will patent protection affect this process? In this paper we first review the evidence on the role of patents for innovation and international technology transfer in general. The literature suggests that patent protection in a host country encourages technology transfer to that country but that its impact on innovation and development is much more ambiguous. We then discuss the implications of these findings and other technology-specific evidence for the diffusion of climate change-related technologies. We conclude that the "gdouble externality" problem, that is the presence of both environmental and knowledge externalities, implies that IP may not be the ideal and cannot be the only policy instrument to encourage innovation in this area and that the range and variety of green technologies as well as the need for local adaptation of technologies means that patent protection may be neither available nor useful in some settings.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9183783145f9d1c489d266b432750d7395eee8e5

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In Economics and Econometrics

Citations in the corpus

Environmental Regulation and the Cross-Border Diffusion of New Technology: Evidence from Automobile Patents (2015, unknown): “Much f the existing controversy in this area has surrounded intellectual roperty rights (IPRs) and the degree to which strengthening IPR egimes helps or hinders the international diffusion of new techology (see, for example, Hall and Helmers, 2010; Ockwell et al., 011).”
Innovation and diffusion of clean/green technology: Can patent commons help? (2013, unknown): “…to the commons.6 Relative to the size of these firms’ patent portfolios, this is a small number; however, it could be large given the small share of directly climate-change related patents in these firms’ total patenting.7 5 For a review of the relevant literature see Hall and Helmers (2010).”
Induced innovation in clean energy technologies from foreign environmental policy stringency? (2019, background): “In sum, we examine a large gap in the literature, contextually represented by the importance of international political economy regimes and the innovative development of clean energy technologies, which is not satisfactorily examined (Hall & Helmers, 2010: 24).”
Is green the new gold? Venture capital and green entrepreneurship (2016, unknown): “…renewable energy resources, technologies using renewable energy sources, energy storage, distribution and management technologies, recycling and waste technologies, industrial processes, and technologies for capture, storage, and treatment or disposal of greenhouse gases (Hall and Helmers 2010).”
The Role of Technological Change in Green Growth (2012, background): “Hall and Helmers (2010) provide an extensive review of the literature on patent protection.”