Several efforts have been made to track progress on environmental innovations using very different approaches. However, many lack coverage, granularity, timeliness and may involve high data collection costs, especially when conducted on a large scale. Traditional indicators also overlook commercialized innovation and breakthrough innovation. This issue is particularly relevant for environmental innovation, where scaling-up is considered key to address the climate, biodiversity and pollution crises.
This paper reviews potential metrics to measure commercialized climate change-related innovation and to measure breakthrough environmental innovation. By comparing advantages and drawbacks of various options, it selects two families of metrics to measure commercialized climate change-related innovation: one based on patent assignments and the other one based on licensing agreements.
For breakthrough environmental innovation, the paper concludes that a family of metrics based on venture capital data is currently the most promising option to pursue. It then develops the selected new metrics and provides trends in environmental innovation over time, across sectors and when possible across countries.