The article analyzes whether and to what extent regional related and unrelated variety matter for the development of green technology, and whether their influence differs over the technology life cycle. Using patent and socioeconomic data on a thirty-year (1980–2009) panel of US states, we find that unrelated variety is a positive predictor of green innovative activities. When unpacked over the life cycle, unrelated variety is the main driver of green technology development in the early stages, while related variety becomes more prominent as the technology enters into maturity.

The present study provides an analysis of empirical regularities in the development of green technology. We use patent data to examine inventions that can be traced to the environment-related catalogue (ENV-Tech) covering technologies in environmental management, water-related adaptation and climate change mitigation. Furthermore, we employ the Economic Fitness-Complexity (EFC) approach to assess their development and geographical distribution across countries between 1970 and 2010. This allows us to identify three typologies of countries: leaders, laggards and catch-up. While, as expected, there is a direct relationship between GDP per capita and invention capacity, we also document the remarkable growth of East Asia countries that started from the periphery and rapidly established themselves as key actors. This geographical pattern coincides with higher integration across domains so that, while the relative development of individual areas may have peaked, there is now demand for greater interoperability across green technologies.

Science policymakers are devoting increasing attention to enhancing the social valorization of scientific knowledge. Since 2010, several international evaluation initiatives have been implemented to assess knowledge transfer and exchange practices and the societal impacts of research. Analysis of these initiatives would allow investigation of the different knowledge transfer and exchange channels and their effects on society and how their effects could be evaluated and boosted. The present study analyses the transfer sexenio programme, which is a first (pilot) assessment that was conducted in Spain to evaluate the engagement of individual researchers in knowledge transfer to and knowledge exchange with non-academic stakeholders, including professionals and society at large. The breadth of the information and supporting documentation available (more than 16,000 applications and 81,000 contributions) allows an exploration of knowledge valorization practices in terms of the transfer forms used and the researchers involved—distinguishing between the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) and Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts (SSHA) areas. By focusing on SSHA fields, we explore knowledge dissemination via enlightenment or professional outputs. We conduct quantitative and qualitative analysis which provide a more comprehensive overview of knowledge transfer practices in Spain in the SSHA field, in particular, and has implications for future assessment exercises.