Knowing brown and inventing green? Incremental and radical innovative activities in the automotive sector

The development of low emission vehicles (LEVs) represents a typical case of technological competition between two green trajectories. On the one hand, the incremental trajectory aims at improving the efficiency of the dominant design, greening the internal combustion engine (ICEG). On the other hand, the radical trajectory targets the progress of hybrid, electric and fuel cell vehicles (HEF). This paper studies the innovative behaviours of firms in the automotive sector patenting in both trajectories. It investigates the extent to which technological leadership in green patents is rooted in firms’ knowledge and capabilities accumulated in brown domains. Using a novel dataset of automotive firms with patenting activity at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) between 2001 and 2018, we find that related ‘brown knowledge’ denotes leadership in green trajectories.