Abstract:

This paper is the first attempt to link innovation and sustainable development in Greece. Sustainable development has been created to describe the development that satisfies the needs of today without risking the capacity of the future generations to satisfy their own needs. The role of innovation in this procedure is central. The existing bibliography has introduced the term ‘sustainable innovation’, as innovation that aims at addressing the problems of both climate change and environment. In this context, ‘sustainable’ innovation is innovation that optimize the use and exploitation of natural resources, save energy, promote the ecological building, contribute to sustainable agriculture, etc.. Our analysis is a first research effort to describe and measure ‘sustainable innovation’ in Greece. We rely on patent data and more precisely on the total of patents that have been granted by the Greek patent office. The existing pattern shows that Greek innovation is characterized by a traditional technology orientation, where a large part of technologies is related to the construction industry and the agricultural sector. Almost the 11% of patents could be directly linked to sustainable development, focusing on the optimization of the exploitation of natural resources. On the contrary we have no patents in ‘sustainable’ agriculture. Deepening our analysis it can be shown that Greek inventors develop patents aiming at the saving of energy in buildings. Greece is now developing a new and environmental policy, which promotes and finances specific economic activities. This paper could contribute to this development of both policy and related measures.