A patent landscape of sustainable mobility innovations in land transportation

Abstract

Technological innovation can play a major role in developing a sustainable mobility system. To generate a state-of-the-art of sustainable mobility innovations, and understand its future trajectory we use the systemic perspective of the sustainable mobility paradigm Avoid-Shift-Improve to present a patent landscape of the entire land-transportation system. The descriptive part of our study covers 425,885 granted patent families between 1970 and 2016 across 75 patent jurisdictions. In the predictive part, we use this dataset to forecast sustainable mobility innovations till 2030. We identify the USA, and China are the leading knowledge importers in sustainable mobility innovations, whereas Japan and Germany are the leading knowledge exporters. Overall, our analysis suggests that there is a visible shift in sustainable mobility innovation towards a low emission mobility future that is more connected and electric than before. However, the combined effects of continued growth in innovation for efficiency gain in GHG emitting mobility technologies, a high level of uncertainty in future innovation trajectory in vehicle charging and hydrogen technology, and a low level of innovation activities in mass and non-motorized transportation technologies can imperil a faster transition to a zero-emission future of mobility.