Based on patent data and industry specific energy prices for 18 OECD countries over 30 years we investigate on an industry level the impact of energy prices on green innovation activities. Our econometric models show that energy prices and green innovation activities are positively related and that energy prices have a significantly positive impact on the ratio of green innovations to non-green innovations. More concretely, our main model shows that a 10% increase of the average energy prices over the previous five years results in a 3.4% and 4.8% increase of the number of green innovations and the ratio of green innovations to non-green innovations, respectively. We also find that the impact of energy prices increases with an increasing lag between energy prices and innovation activities. Robustness tests confirm the main results.

Innovative start-ups, not start-ups in general, seem to be important drivers of economic growth. However, little is known about what such firms look like. As activities of start-ups are strongly related to firm founders, we investigate this question focusing on the innovation capability of firm founders. We find that the combination of different founder characteristics such as university education (at best a combination of technical and commercial education), prior experience in R&D, and strong motivation to realize own innovative ideas increases the likelihood that a start-up has innovative activities, especially the likelihood of R&D activities, by >40%.

Although there are some studies that empirically test the impact of financial constraints on the success of start-ups, the persistence of this impact is not well understood. Using survey data for a cohort of Swiss start-ups that were observed during a period of 10 years, we find that financial constraints are not only a problem of the first years. Although the negative impact of financial constraints on firm survival disappears with increasing age of the firms, profit is persistently negatively affected by financial constraints.

Based on representative firm-level survey data for Austria, Germany, and Switzerland, this study systematically analyses the relevance and drivers of barriers to green product innovation using the example of green energy technologies. ‘Low willingness to pay’, ‘high development costs’, ‘high commercial uncertainty’, and ‘lack of favourable political framework’ are identified as the most important barriers. Moreover, we find that the firms’ innovation experience is an important driver of the level of green innovation barriers. Green innovation barriers are more accentuated for firms with green innovation activity than for firms with no green innovation activity. However, experience from different fields of green innovation and experience from non-green innovation activities help to limit these barriers.