The acceleration of the invention and deployment of clean energy technologies is an important national priority. Awareness of these challenges has elicited a recent increase in patenting and investment in clean energy technologies. Yet, there is little understanding of how these technologies enter the market and how policies can be implemented that increase their rate of diffusion and application. This research develops and characterizes the relationships between five measures: future patent citations (a widely used though far from "golden" standard of patent impact); web search hits and content analyses of those hits; expert assessments from clean energy scientists; a survey of clean energy inventors; and case studies.
Intellectual Merit: The research investigates five key questions: 1. What are the trends in clean energy technologies and sources of inventions by field (biofuels, geothermal, hydro, solar, wind) organization (industry, government lab, universities, individual inventor), and by geography (U.S. states and international). 2. What are the sources of breakthroughs? How and why do they differ by field? 3. How do clean energy technologies diffuse from lab to application? Where are the bottlenecks and what can be done to break them? 4. How does government funding influence these processes? Why is funding effective in one field and not another? 5. Why do some technical breakthroughs fail in deployment?
The research develops a comprehensive dataset to address these questions. As such, it goes beyond the historical reliance on case studies, which while highly informative and richly descriptive, remain difficult to generalize and quantify. It develops a systematic and complete data on the science, invention, and deployment processes to help inform questions of optimal investment and portfolio management.
Broader Impacts: It has long been received wisdom that investment in research greatly facilitates the technological progress that ultimately improves economic productivity and living standards. The research advances public understanding in the context of clean energy - and in the process, calculates, characterizes, and publishes a novel web-based measure for researchers in all fields of patented technology. The web-based measure provides an automated and universally calculated measure that goes beyond the current standard of patent citations as an indicator of patent quality.
