Source: Bjorn Jindra and Matheus Leusin, The Development of Digital Sustainability Technologies by Top R&D Investors (Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union, 2022).
Commentary: A recent paper published by the Publications Office of the European Union calculates the number of “digital sustainability” inventions by the top 2,000 R&D-investing firms (as measured by the European Union’s R&D Scoreboard) between 2016 and 2018. Digital sustainable technologies are those that use digital technology to achieve goals relating to sustainable development and represent the intersection of green and digital technologies. The authors measured inventions by the number of patents from the PATSTAT database and only considered priority patents to avoid potential double-counting.
Only 403 of the 2,000 R&D Scoreboard companies filed digital sustainability technology priority patents between 2016 and 2018. Nevertheless, these companies accounted for 65 percent of the 7,808 such patents filed worldwide in that period. They were led by U.S. companies Qualcomm (236 patents), Intel (230), and General Electric (223). South Korea’s Samsung Electronics (213) and Japan’s Fanuc (168) also ranked in the top five. Japan and the United States each claim 15 of the top 50 individual firms, followed by China and South Korea with eight and six top-50 firms, respectively. As a whole, the European Union only claims four of the top 50 companies, though Germany’s Siemens ranks sixth. More generally, U.S.-headquartered companies accounted for 36 percent of the digital sustainability inventions filed by R&D Scoreboard companies, followed by Japan (approximately 28 percent), China (10 percent), and South Korea (10 percent).
