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energy will be a major contributor to national economic competitiveness in the coming
decades. For the United States to establish and maintain a leadership position in the
energy economy, new investments are needed to effectively and efficiently stimulate,
commercialize, and deploy new energy innovations within our borders and abroad. If
this does not occur, the United States runs a risk of falling short of its ability to
effectively compete and lead in the global marketplace.

The potential financial opportunities and the opportunity to lead in the global economy
have elicited a surge in patenting and investment in clean energy technologies. A leading
barometer of inventive activity, the Clean Energy Patent Growth Index [28], shows
continuing increases in clean energy patenting activity, yet we currently lack an
empirically grounded understanding of how these technologies are invented and enter the
market. Policy prescriptions that are a mixture of technology and market stimulation
activities may accelerate invention in one industry yet might be ineffectual or even
counterproductive in another. For example, if breakthroughs have historically arisen
from understanding basic science in one field, and more of these types of innovations are
required, then the optimal allocation of funds would be to support early-stage research at
universities, national laboratories, or some other similar organization that has previously
performed this type of work. On the other hand, if the technology is mature and
development of breakthroughs needs to be focused on commercialization and the market,
then applied research in government laboratories (most national research facilities
increasingly perform a mixture of basic and applied research) or market development
activities targeted at private firms might be preferred. Alternatively, fundamental science
and understanding may play a far less important role in the development of new
technologies. This could manifest if independent inventors were the sources of technical
breakthroughs [29] because commercially important innovations could be made without
sophisticated experimental facilities (e.g., solar thermal versus photovoltaics). In this
case, facilitating commercial deployment of technologies may only require helping
functional breakthroughs get to market by providing small business and entrepreneurship
loans, incentives for private investment, or other prescriptions to facilitate robust markets
for technology [30, 31].

Managing a portfolio of research, development, and deployment investments in the
constantly and rapidly evolving energy landscape is a great challenge to public and
private research managers. The ultimate aim of this paper is to suggest a line of inquiry
to inform research investment decisions across all clean energy technologies and the
whole market, ultimately allowing more efficient and effective technology and market
investments. This report and its recommendations are preliminary and dependent on the
new techniques developed as a part of this work; we expect the scope and specificity of
recommendations to continue to evolve as our methodology improves.

This analysis began by asking the question, where do breakthrough innovations in energy
originate? While certainly omitting some other potential measures of the advancement of
knowledge, such as publications, this investigation uses the patent record as a proxy for
innovation [32] and analyzes the sources of breakthrough patents using cutting-edge
analytical techniques. This analysis begins by determining patenting trends in biofuel,
geothermal, hydro, solar, and wind technologies and continues by mapping the

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