The effects of environmental technologies: evidences of different national innovation systems

Abstract Innovation has a key role in encourage technology improvements so that countries are able to find answers to environmental challenges. For this reason, paradigm shifts call for systematic efforts to address the problems which productive technologies and systems are not able to solve. This work aimed identify the specific scientific and technological areas that fostered environmental technological development in 1990, 2000 and 2010 in developed and developing countries. The methodological application involved the construction of technological matrices via environmental patents. The results showed that international environmental treaties and protocols contributed to increasing the production of environmental technologies, particularly after 1990. Moreover, was observed that in developed countries the evolution and performance of science and environmental technology interactions over time are factors inherent in their learning process and depend much more on the countries’ technological trajectories. The analysis revealed that the developing countries are still attempting to become established in areas in which the developed countries already have extensive scientific and technological knowledge, which are the ‘semiconductors’, ‘telecommunications’ and ‘optical’ areas.