Gone with the wind: a learning curve analysis of China's wind power industry

This study examines how accumulation of experience and knowledge by wind farm developers and turbine manufacturers contributed to productivity gains in China's wind power industry during its rapid expansion phase between 2005 and 2012. A learning curve analysis is conducted on an original dataset of 312 Chinese wind farms under the Clean Development Mechanism. A key strength of the dataset is that it includes data on actual, wind-farm level power generation. The analysis, based on third-party verified data, reveals that the experience and knowledge accumulation did not result in improvements in generation performance, turbine size, or unit turbine costs of Chinese wind farms. Rather, generation performance was driven by capital investments (i.e., larger and more expensive wind farms performed better). Turbine cost reductions were achieved by intense price competition which hampered investments in technology improvement and quality assurance. The Chinese wind power case demonstrates how market expansion, in the absence of carefully designed innovation policies that complement deployment policies, does not necessarily lead to technological learning. Fostering the technological capability of local industry can take a long time. When scale-up happens quickly, it is crucial to develop and refine local technological capability

Spatial lifecycles of cleantech industries - The global development history of solar photovoltaics

New industries develop in increasingly globalized networks, whose dynamics are not well understood by academia and policy making. Solar photovoltaics (PV) are a case in point for an industry that experienced several shifts in its spatial organization over a short period of time. A lively debate has recently emerged on whether the spatial dynamics in new cleantech sectors are in line with existing industry lifecycle models or whether globalization created new lifecycle patterns that are not fully explained in the literature. This paper addresses this question based on an extensive analysis of quantitative data in the solar PV sector. Comprehensive global databases containing 86,000 patents as well as manufacturing and sales records are used to analyze geographic shifts in the PV sector's innovation, manufacturing and market deployment activities between 1990 and 2012. The analysis reveals spatial lifecycle patterns with lower-than-expected first mover advantages in manufacturing and market activities and an earlier entry of firms from emerging economies in manufacturing and knowledge creation. We discuss implications of these findings for the competitive positions of companies in developed and emerging economies, derive new stylized hypotheses for industry lifecycle theories, and sketch policy approaches that are reflexive of global interdependencies in emerging cleantech industries

The role of inter-sectoral learning in knowledge development and diffusion: Case studies on three clean energy technologies

ISSN:0040-162

Technology Life-Cycles in the Energy Sector - Technological Characteristics and the Role of Deployment for Innovation

Understanding the long-term patterns of innovation in energy technologies is crucial for technology forecasting and public policy planning in the context of climate change. This paper analyzes which of two common models of innovation over the technology life-cycle – the product-process innovation shift observed for mass-produced goods or the system-component shift observed for complex products and systems – best describes the pattern of innovation in energy technologies. To this end, we develop a novel, patent-based methodology to study how the focus of innovation changes over the course of the technology life-cycle. Specifically, we analyze patent-citation networks in solar PV and wind power in the period 1963–2009. The results suggest that solar PV technology followed the life-cycle pattern of mass-produced goods: early product innovations were followed by a surge of process innovations in solar cell production. Wind turbine technology, by contrast, more closely resembled the life-cycle of complex products and systems: the focus of innovative activity shifted over time through different parts of the product, rather than from product to process innovations. These findings point to very different innovation and learning processes in energy technologies and the need to tailor technology policy to technological characteristics. They also help conceptualize previously inconclusive evidence about the impact of technology policies in the past.ISSN:0040-162

How a product's design hierarchy shapes the evolution of technological knowledge - Evidence from patent-citation networks in wind power

We analyze how a product's design hierarchy shapes the focus of inventive activity and the expansion of the underlying body of knowledge, building on the complex-system perspective on technological evolution. This perspective suggests that the design hierarchy of a product can have an ordering effect on the evolution of commercialized artifacts, in particular when product design decisions on high levels of the design hierarchy set the agenda for subsequent variation and experimentation on lower levels. We extend this literature by analyzing the design hierarchy's effect on the evolution of the industry's knowledge base, using the case of wind turbine technology over the period 1973–2009. We assess the technological focus of patents along the core trajectory of knowledge generation, identified through a patent-citation network analysis, and link it to a classification of technological problems into different levels in the design hierarchy. Our analysis suggests that the evolution of an industry's knowledge base along a technological trajectory is not a unidirectional process of gradual refinement: the focus of knowledge generation shifts over time between different sub-systems in a highly sequential pattern, whose order is strongly influenced by the design hierarchy. Each of these shifts initiates the integration of new domains of industry-external knowledge into the knowledge base, thus opening windows of competitive opportunity for potential entrants with strong knowledge positions in the new focus of inventive activity. We discuss implications for the understanding of the competitive advantage of specific knowledge positions of firms and nations and technology policy for emerging technologies.ISSN:0048-7333ISSN:1873-762

Spatial lifecycles of cleantech industries – The global development history of solar photovoltaics

New industries develop in increasingly globalized networks, whose dynamics are not well understood by academia and policy making. Solar photovoltaics (PV) are a case in point for an industry that experienced several shifts in its spatial organization over a short period of time. A lively debate has recently emerged on whether the spatial dynamics in new cleantech sectors are in line with existing industry lifecycle models or whether globalization created new lifecycle patterns that are not fully explained in the literature. This paper addresses this question based on an extensive analysis of quantitative data in the solar PV sector. Comprehensive global databases containing 86,000 patents as well as manufacturing and sales records are used to analyze geographic shifts in the PV sector's innovation, manufacturing and market deployment activities between 1990 and 2012. The analysis reveals spatial lifecycle patterns with lower-than-expected first mover advantages in manufacturing and market activities and an earlier entry of firms from emerging economies in manufacturing and knowledge creation. We discuss implications of these findings for the competitive positions of companies in developed and emerging economies, derive new stylized hypotheses for industry lifecycle theories, and sketch policy approaches that are reflexive of global interdependencies in emerging cleantech industries