Green Growth: A Case Study on the Danish and Chinese Sectoral Innovation Systems

by Enrico Botta

The purpose of this paper is to provide relevant insights to policy makers interested in developing a green innovative industry. In order to shed lights on the process of building a competitive green industry, the paper leverages the conceptual framework of innovation systems. Therefore, the first paragraph reviews the theory of innovation system, explaining the reason behind the choice to use a sectoral approach. The second paragraph exploits the industry life cycle perspective to describe the evolution of the wind turbine technology. Then, within the next two paragraphs the key constituting elements of the Chinese and Danish systems are described. Finally, building on our understanding of the evolution of the wind turbine technology and of the configuration of the two sectoral innovation systems, the differences and similarities between the two cases are discussed and the key conclusions from the perspective of a policy maker are presented. Our main argument is that the stage of technological evolution together with the maturity of the domestic sector is one of the main explanatory variables that allows to understand which functions (and how) should be activated by the policies aiming at developing a green SIS.