Team diversity and radical green innovation: a patent-based analysis of gender, geographic, and institutional effects

Abstract Achieving ambitious climate goals hinges on radical green innovation, yet how inventor-team composition shapes the radicalness of green patents remains largely unexplored. Drawing on theories of knowledge heterogeneity and recombination, we jointly assess three dimensions of diversity that prior work has typically examined in isolation: gender and geographic diversity among inventors, and institutional diversity among co-assignees. We analyze 124,114 green patent families filed at the European Patent Office between 1990 and 2020 using fractional response models. Gender diversity shows a negative association with radicalness, contrasting with evidence from general, technology-wide patenting, where gender diversity has been linked to greater novelty. Geographic diversity is positively related to radicalness in the full population and remains positive among co-assigned patents, though with weaker statistical support in this smaller subsample. Institutional diversity displays a positive but modest association within the 12,267 co-assigned families for which it can be measured. Among collaboration types, partnerships with universities show a positive link, whereas inter-firm ones show a negative one. These patterns hold broadly across alternative diversity measures, estimation methods, and additional sensitivity analyses. Overall, our results demonstrate that diversity is not uniformly related to radical green innovation: its implications vary across dimensions of diversity and depend on the organizational context in which heterogeneous knowledge is integrated. These findings underscore the importance of adopting a multidimensional perspective on team diversity and offer implications for innovation management and public policies aimed at fostering radical green innovation.