Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Renewable Energy

Ramana  Nanda; Ken  Younge; Lee  Fleming

Chapter | The Changing Frontier: Rethinking Science and Innovation Policy | 2015

Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Renewable Energy

by Ramana Nanda, Ken Younge and Lee Fleming

Abstract

We document three facts related to innovation and entrepreneurship in renewable energy. Using data from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, we first show that patenting in renewable energy remains highly concentrated in a few large energy firms. In 2009, the top 20 firms accounted for over 40% of renewable energy patents in our data. Second, we compare patenting by venture-backed startups and incumbent firms. Using a variety of measures, we find that VC-backed startups are engaged in more novel and more highly cited innovations, compared to incumbent firms. Incumbent firms also have a higher share of patents that are completely un-cited or self-cited, suggesting that incumbents are more likely to engage in incremental innovation compared to VC-backed startups. Third, we document a rising share of patenting by startups that coincided with the surge in venture capital finance for renewable energy technologies in the early 2000s. We also point to structural factors about renewable energy that have caused the availability of venture capital finance for renewable energy to fall dramatically in recent years, with potential implications for the rate and trajectory of innovation in this sector.

Keywords: entrepreneurial finance; energy; entrepreneurial management; Energy; Finance; Entrepreneurship; Energy Industry;

Format: Print

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Citation:

Nanda, Ramana, Ken Younge, and Lee Fleming. "Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Renewable Energy." Chap. 7 in The Changing Frontier: Rethinking Science and Innovation Policy, edited by Adam Jaffe and Benjamin Jones, 199–232. University of Chicago Press, 2015.

In 2018, Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) were an emerging fundraising method for blockchain-based projects. As the ecosystem grew, there were many open questions on regulation, pricing, and even which projects were a good fit for blockchain. However, there was already some emerging consensus on the benefits and challenges of building with blockchain and emerging best practices for Initial Coin Offerings.

In recent years, much has been written about how the Blockchain is poised to transform traditional industries such as banking, real estate, and healthcare. More recently, it has gained attention as a way to finance new ventures, through what is known as an Initial Coin Offering (ICO). Less noticed, though, is ICOs appear almost antithetical to the standard approach to financing a risky venture. Structured experimentation, popularized by Eric Ries' The Lean Startup, has been widely embraced as the gold standard for how to approach the commercialization of radical new ideas. From Boston to Beijing to Bangalore, entrepreneurs and investors rattle off the importance of designing focused experiments to test hypotheses in a capital-efficient fashion in order to achieve product-market fit. But ICOs substantially limit the benefits associated with such staged experimentation, for three reasons.

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Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Renewable Energy

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