Claudia Ghisetti (UNICATT)

“Design and innovation: Does the “green-matching” actually help?”

Abstract: This paper investigates the role of design in driving inventions in environmental technologies at the firm level. In particular, it aims at ascertaining whether green-oriented design is actually capable and thus necessary to increase inventive activities towards environmental goals, to a greater extent than what ‘standard’ design can do with respect to non-environmental inventions. Furthermore, we look at whether such an impact is conditional on the innovative potential and capabilities of the focal firm, as reflected by its level of R&D expenditure. We address these research questions with respect to the top R&D spenders at the world level, drawing on the EC-JRC/OECD COR&DIP© database on their bundle of intellectual property rights). By a textual research we extended the database to include an original measurement of “green-design” and “green trademark”. Our main finding is that such “green” kind of design increases firms’ environmental innovations (approximated by patent applications) to a lager extent than non-environmental ones, but that ‘standard’ design also helps in the same respect. This relationship is actually conditional on the firms’ innovative capacity, as the innovation “prize” of green-design does emerge only once a minimum threshold of R&D expenditure has been reached.