Green Tech for Green Growth? Insights from Nordic Environmental Innovation

Under a green growth strategy, technological solutions play a key role in decoupling growth and emissions - but bringing new technologies to the market remains difficult. We investigate here based on insights from the Nordic countries, often considered to be leading in environmental innovation, how and why the journey of many green technologies from their early conception to their large-scale adoption and upscaling remains a serious challenge. Our research is based on a sample of green patents complemented by interviews with their inventors and patentees. We observe that green technology innovation generally comprises seven different stages: R&D, start-up, patenting, upscaling, dealing with risk, commercialisation, and adoption. Four main factors influence and shape these stages: the organisational setting, the technology-specific characteristics, the funding available, and the commercial market conditions. The insights from our study on green technology development allows for distinguishing shared framework conditions from technology specific ones and can help inform innovation policies. Upscaling of green technology innovations remains an almost impervious and difficult process, harder and more enduring than most inventors – and certainly the public as well as many policy makers – expect.