Technology Life-Cycles in the Energy Sector – Technological Characteristics and the Role of Deployment for Innovation

By J. Huenteler, Tobias S. Schmidt, Jan Ossenbrink, V. H. Hoffmann. 2016

261 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Understanding the long-term patterns of innovation in energy technologies is crucial for technology forecasting and public policy planning in the context of climate change. This paper analyzes which of two common models of innovation over the technology life-cycle – the product-process innovation shift observed for mass-produced goods or the system-component shift observed for complex products and systems – best describes the pattern of innovation in energy technologies. To this end, we develop a novel, patent-based methodology to study how the focus of innovation changes over the course of the technology life-cycle. Specifically, we analyze patent-citation networks in solar PV and wind power in the period 1963–2009. The results suggest that solar PV technology followed the life-cycle pattern of mass-produced goods: early product innovations were followed by a surge of process innovations in solar cell production. Wind turbine technology, by contrast, more closely resembled the life-cycle of complex products and systems: the focus of innovative activity shifted over time through different parts of the product, rather than from product to process innovations. These findings point to very different innovation and learning processes in energy technologies and the need to tailor technology policy to technological characteristics. They also help conceptualize previously inconclusive evidence about the impact of technology policies in the past.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Management Science and Operations Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f807652c5f3317a5ffbe3d0dfc8f958e5e843213

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Citations in the corpus

Competitive advantage in the renewable energy industry: Evidence from a gravity model (2019, result): “The dynamic difference between the wind and solar PV industries are in line with recent results of industrial catching-up literature (Huenteler et al. 2016; Binz et al. 2017) that suggest that catchingup dynamics by latecomers are influenced by the underlying technology involved across different tec”
Barriers to Path Creation: The Case of Offshore Wind Power in Norway (2018, background): “As such, bricolage-type interaction and collective learning-by-using, that are key in the wind energy industry (Huenteler et al. 2016), and also pivotal in the co-creation of technology and institutions (Garud and Karnøe 2003), had barren conditions.”
Do policy mix characteristics matter for low-carbon innovation? A survey-based exploration of renewable power generation technologies in Germany (2018, background): “Our framework also considers a firm’s technology portfolio to control for differences between renewable energy technologies and the relative importance of its green branch, as this may affect a firm's perceptions of and responses to policy stimuli (Huenteler et al., 2016; Schmidt et al., 2012).”
The Future of Ex-Ante LCA? Lessons Learned and Practical Recommendations (2019, background): “[101] distinguish between two categories of products that define the learning potential.”