FEEM Researcher E. Verdolini Wins Best Paper Award at 6th European Conference on Corporate R&D and Innovation, 2017
A major concern regarding innovation in the EU is that the fragmentation of its innovation system may hinder knowledge flows and, consequently, spillovers across member countries. FEEM Working Paper 71.2016, Transition Towards a Green Economy in Europe: Innovation and Knowledge Integration in the Renewable Energy Sector, investigates the fragmentation of the EU innovation system in the field of renewable energy sources (RES). The paper, co-authored by FEEM researcher E. Verdolini, C. Conti, M. L. Mancusi, F. Sanna-Randaccio and R. Sestini, shows that EU inventors have increasingly built “on the shoulders of the other EU giants”, intensifying their citations to other member countries and decreasing those to domestic inventors and to inventors from the USA. This pattern is peculiar to renewable energy sources and suggests that the EU has reduced fragmentation in the RES knowledge space and strengthened its position as source of RES knowledge.