Department Profiles
Research Profiles of the IWH Departments All doctoral students are allocated to one...
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Department Profiles
Research Profiles of the IWH Departments All doctoral students are allocated to one...
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East Germany
The Nasty Gap 30 years after unification: Why East Germany is still 20% poorer than the...
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Research Clusters
Three Research Clusters ...
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Alumni
IWH Alumni The IWH would like to stay in contact with its former employees. We...
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R&D Collaboration for Environmental Innovation
Gunnar Pippel
International Journal of Innovation Management,
No. 1,
2015
Abstract
The literature on the impact of R&D collaboration on environmental innovation performance of firms suggests that R&D collaboration is not always beneficial. Therefore, a more detailed analysis of the effects of R&D collaboration is necessary. This paper investigates the impact of R&D collaboration with different partner types on a firm’s environmental innovation performance. In addition, the paper addresses the question of whether the diversity of R&D collaboration partners is important to environmental innovation performance. Firm-level data from 2337 German firms are used in the regression analysis. The results suggest that R&D collaboration with suppliers, customers, universities, governmental research institutes, consultants and other firms within the same firm group has a significant positive impact on a firm’s environmental innovation performance, whereas collaboration with competitors has no significant impact. The diversity of R&D collaboration partners has a significantly positive impact on a firm’s environmental innovation performance.
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Regulation, Innovation and Technology Diffusion - Evidence from Building Energy E fficiency Standards in Germany
Makram El-Shagi, Claus Michelsen, Sebastian Rosenschon
Discussionpapers des DIW Berlin,
No. 1371,
2014
Abstract
The impact of environmental regulation on technology diffusion and innovations is studied using a unique data set of German residential buildings. We analyze how energy effi ciency regulations, in terms of minimum standards, affects energy-use in newly constructed buildings and how it induces innovation in the residential-building industry. The data used consists of a large sample of German apartment houses built between 1950 and 2005. Based on this information, we determine their real energy requirements from energy performance certificates and energy billing information. We develop a new measure for regulation intensity and apply a panel-error-correction regression model to energy requirements of low and high quality housing. Our findings suggest that regulation significantly impacts technology adoption in low quality housing. This, in turn, induces improvements in the high quality segment where innovators respond to market signals.
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Towards a Theory of Climate Innovation - A Model Framework for Analyzing Drivers and Determinants
Wilfried Ehrenfeld
Journal of Evolutionary Economics,
2013
Abstract
In this article, we describe the results of a multiple case study on the indirect corporate innovation impact of climate change in the Central German chemical industry. We investigate the demands imposed on enterprises in this context as well as the sources, outcomes and determining factors in the innovative process at the corporate level. We argue that climate change drives corporate innovations through various channels. A main finding is that rising energy prices were a key driver for incremental energy efficiency innovations in the enterprises’ production processes. For product innovation, customer requests were a main driver, though often these requests are not directly related to climate issues. The introduction or extension of environmental and energy management systems as well as the certification of these are the most common forms of organizational innovations. For marketing purposes, the topic of climate change was hardly utilized so far. As the most important determinants for corporate climate innovations, corporate structure and flexibility of the product portfolio, political asymmetry regarding environmental regulation and governmental funding were identified.
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