Are We Moving Towards a More Sustainable World? Insights from Patent Analysis of Chemical Inventions

Industrialized economies have historically maintained the hope that the advances in science, technology and innovation would have offered to humanity a wide range of options to improve its well-being and attain sustained economic growth. The transition towards a high technological frontier arising from the rapid advances of science, technology and innovation has opened a debate on the relations between innovation-induced industrial activities, related possible social and environmental threats and the role of policies to keep up with industry developments. To investigate those relations, I collect a unique dataset that includes patent applications in chemical technologies and analyse their disclosed groups of compounds by combining patent analysis with computational chemistry, and I develop a novel methodology to measure patent toxicity, that is, the extent to which a patent includes ‘components’ (i.e. chemical compounds) that are potentially toxic to humans and/or the environment. To illustrate the proposed methodology, I analyse the toxicity of 12 regulated chemical technologies as the persistent organic pollutants (POPs) in comparison with a control group of unregulated technologies. The measurement of patent toxicity opens up interesting avenues for future research and for policy.