Academic Inventors and the Antecedents of Green Technologies. A Regional Analysis of Italian Patent Data

This work investigates the generation of green technologies (GTs) in Italian NUTS 3 regions across time, by focusing on the knowledge generation mechanisms underlying the creation of green patents. Firstly, we hypothesize that inventions in non-green technological domains positively influence the generation of GTs, because the latter occur as the outcome of a recombination process among a wide array of technological domains. Secondly, we hypothesise that the involvement of academic inventors in patenting activity bears positive effects on the generation of GTs, because they are able to manage the recombination across different technological domains. Thirdly, we explore the interaction effect between academic inventors’ involvement and non-green technologies to investigate whether the former are especially relevant in presence of higher or lower levels of the latter. We estimate zero-inflated negative binomial, spatial durbin and logistic regressions on a dataset of 103 Italian NUTS 3 regions for which we collected patent and regional data for the time span 1998-2009. The results suggest that both academic inventors and spillovers from polluting technologies bear positive direct effects on the generation of GTs; moreover, we find that academic inventors compensate for low levels of spillovers.