How to Power the Energy Innovation Lifecycle

Center for American Progress (Pool) - This paper focuses on clean energy technology innovation—the invention and propagation of new machines that generate, save, or transmit energy. But as we will show, producing these new devices also requires the use of new modes of manufacturing, which can be thought of as technologies themselves, as well as new business models that can finance, produce, market, and sell these new machines.

Creating a clean energy economy is just as much about “process innovation”—incremental improvements to the materials and manufacturing process of technologies we already know about—as it is about finding new or undiscovered “breakthrough technologies.” Understanding the five phases of energy “innovation lifecycles” and the five kinds of participants in “innovation networks” will help show how these seemingly separate goals are actually related. Read the full report (pdf)