Massimo Pizzol @massimopizzol@qoto.org

More #introduction...

#Sustainability
#IndustrialEcology
#emergingtechnology
#uncertainty
#PostNormalScience
#circulareconomy
#bioeconomy
#BlueEconomy

I got a PM from the server #moderator yesterday because I am basically...tooting like a bot!

I had to prove I am a real person and a nice chat about the tooting style here. Learning by doing... Keyword: engage with the #community.

(First time I have been "moderated" in a #SoMe but actually good experience)

#tootinglikeabot

#introduction
Interests
#Environment
#climate
#lifecycleassessment
#Science
#academia
#economics
#technology
#models
#data
#research

..and much more.
Read the paper. Here the link, plenty of details there. 👇Enjoy
https://link-springer-com.zorac.aub.aau.dk/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-08313-6_8

☑️Investors: when it comes to green technology are risk-averse and keen to ensure stable market conditions in the long term, which is only rarely achieved. They want policy to make the market stable...and secure...😵

☑️(This was great) To get the funding many responded one needs “the right guy” or “the guy who is good at getting money”. Forget about green tech as just engineers, this is a business issue just as much.

☑️What is scale up for green tech? From building many large plants of relatively low-tech machinery operating on huge amounts of material (biomass valorisation) to mass-produce high-tech components with high degree of automation (fuel cells)

☑️Policy 👩‍💼, it's tricky. Sometimes policies that try to favour one type of green tech innovation prevent another. E.g. incentives for biofuels do not help developing high value products from biomass.

☑️Funding 💰: a lot of research money but when it comes to upscaling...the costs are orders of magnitude higher and ---there is no money (valley of death issue for green tech).

☑️“catch 22” problem or “chicken-and-egg” 🐓🥚problem: investors want to see the green techn at work in real scale before investing, but funding is required precisely to proof that the techn can work at large scale (because pilot and industrial are hugely different)

☑️The process of environmental innovation is COMPLEX. One does not just...bring a green idea to market. This journey is complicated by several obstacles, technological, organisational, economic, political.

☑️If you think technology is going to save us, you have to arm yourself with patience. Green tech development takes LONG time. The scales are HUGE. The money is SCARCE. The failure rate HIGH.

Not surprisingly, this scheme fits previous theories about innovation and the different steps in technology development (there are several models in the literature about this...).

So what is the new stuff here?????

The new stuff is that we have now a pretty good picture of what is happening in the Nordics when it comes to green tech development. And all the juicy details are in the paper and I can't possibly summarise here. Some key points.

And here the result, we were able to find a structure that fits basically all stories and described the "life cycle" or "journey" of a green tech from conception to market. 7 steps influenced by 4 factors: Organisation, Funding, Technology, Market.

So far so good, we get the big picture: a lot of green tech development going on in all countries, with country specific differences in the type of techs developed.

But we don't know the details of this picture....

So we went qualitative: interviews. 🎤📘🎤📘🎤📘

Conveniently, patent data include names of inventors... It's a gigantic phonebook...but without phone numbers ☹️
So we found the mails/phone numbers of about 200 inventors. Contacted them. Interviewed > 40.

What did we ask? In simple terms, to tell us a story of their technology, what went well, what went wrong, and why. Then we made a qualitative content analysis to summarise findings.

Here green patents classified according to technological domains (data from EPO).
- increasing steadily since 2000 (after 2015 the decrease is due to delays in reporting).
- but country-specific tech development pattern (strongholds or preferred areas)