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Texas appears to produce more commercially relevant solar patents than most other
states. NASA appears to fund commercially important research, while no other
government agencies do in this dataset. Universities dominantly produce more
commercially impactful solar innovations. Again, increasing team size appears to
produce more commercially impactful patents.

These preliminary data hint at a range of potential prescriptive actions that could be taken
to accelerate the development of breakthrough innovations in solar. First, public and
private research could focus on funding teams of researchers rather than individuals.
Previous research tells us that independent inventors typically produce more failed
inventions but also can create more disruptive breakthroughs because independent
innovators do not have collaborators inducing “groupthink” [78, 79]. Despite the
promise of radical breakthroughs, independent inventors on average produce lower value
innovations and may hinder efforts to optimize research dollars toward increasing the
likelihood of major impact. Alternately, perhaps, independent innovators should
continue to be allowed to innovate independently but then be provided with better
mechanisms to support technology commercialization through collaboration with large
6
organizations; e.g., the NREL Commercialization Assistance Program (NCAP).
Research increasingly shows that breakthrough innovations can be accelerated in
environmental contexts that maximize cross-pollination and the free flow of ideas [79].
Our results provide quantitative insight on the effectiveness of particular geographic
clusters and indicate which of these may be exploited. The data suggest that California
may excel at producing important but incremental innovations, while Colorado may
produce more commercially valuable innovations. While the institutional and social
sources of these differences merit further investigation, innovation clusters are
increasingly considered to be path-dependent: accumulated human, physical, and
financial capital in a particular technology sector predisposes the cluster to future
innovation in that sector [80, 81]. Building on this observation, universities with
historically important solar innovations should be looked to as breeding grounds for new
commercially impactful breakthroughs, while corporations may be better at creating
technical breakthroughs that incrementally enrich the technological landscape of the
whole industry. Finally, on a more qualitative bent requiring further research, it is
apparent that NASA has effectively sponsored high impact research from both a technical
and commercial perspective. Qualitative assessment of their funding priorities, process,
and management may provide additional insights on how to improve other public
departments’ efforts.

3.3.2 Wind
DOE- and NASA-funded wind patents are cited more strongly than other government-
funded wind patents (Table 4 for all wind data). Larger teams are associated with more
highly cited patents. Texas wind patents are less highly cited than those from other states.
It appears that this is due to a high percentage of independent inventors (55% versus 49%
average) that produce uncharacteristically low value patents (average independent Texas
citations = 4.3 versus average independent citations for all wind patents = 5.9). Wind

6 NREL. “Commercialization Assistance Program,” http://www.nrel.gov/technologytransfer/ncap.html.
Accessed March 7, 2011.

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