The development of digital sustainability technologies by top R&D investors

The report offers a novel approach to identify patents associated with digital sustainability technologies, which combine components of digital technologies with technologies that are relevant for climate change mitigation or adaption. We propose an identification strategy based upon six search modules, which combine specialists’ opinion, keywords and classification-based approaches. We generate two datasets. For the first, we use PATSTAT 2019a to identify 319,243 patents associated with digital sustainability technologies. We use this dataset to evaluate the accuracy of the proposed strategy in finding technologies that combine both a digital and a sustainable aspect. We find an accuracy above 95.5% for all search modules implemented in the proposed strategy. For the second dataset, we implement the proposed strategy to update the results using PATSTAT 2021b. To make the results more comparable to the EU climate neutrality report 2021 edition, we focus on the period from 2016 to 2018 and filter priority patents using the IP5 strategy. We link the retrieved patents to R&D Scoreboard companies using the JRC-OECD COR&DIP© v.3 dataset. We identify for all R&D Scoreboard companies 325,508 patents in total, from which 5,057 are digital sustainability patents.