Innovation ecosystems and energy innovation in developed economies: Disentangling the drivers of fossil fuel and sustainable clean energy innovation

Innovation ecosystems create a conductive environment to advance novel technologies. Despite being introduced over a decade ago, the structure of innovation ecosystems continues to be debated. The framework proposed by Granstrand and Holgersson (2020) provides a comprehensive multidimensional outline of innovation ecosystems. Yet, it remains largely untested, especially to understand the link between each dimension of innovation and sector-specific innovation outcomes in the context of energy technologies. Thus, the purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of the innovation ecosystem components proposed, including actors, activities, artifacts, institutions, and relational dynamics, on sustainable and traditional energy innovation. We apply a high-dimensional fixed effects model with a longitudinal dataset from 2002 to 2021 to test these relationships and demonstrate their impacts on sustainable and traditional energy innovation, as measured by clean and fossil fuel patents. Results show actors significantly enhance both types of energy innovation, while institutions exhibit greater relevance for sustainable energy. Conversely, collaboration is negatively associated with fossil fuel innovation, suggesting a potential misalignment in incentives from shared intellectual property and nationally embedded legacy energy strategies. Overall, this study demonstrates how national energy innovation, which is currently undergoing a major transformation, may be understood as embedded in broader systems of interdependent components and relationships. Practically, it informs policy design for ecosystem structures to guide sustainable energy transitions. Theoretically, the findings underscore the differentiated roles of innovation ecosystem components across energy innovation paradigms. This study provides one of the first large-scale empirical tests of the multidimensional innovation ecosystem framework. It contributes to theory by demonstrating that systems apply an asymmetric effect on innovation outcomes, rather than uniformly positive ones.