General wisdom concerning the factors affecting the adoption of cleaner technologies: a survey 1990e2007 Carlos Montalvo * TNO Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research, Schoemakerstraat 97, P.O. Box 6030, 2600 JA Delft, The Netherlands Abstract Cleaner technologies (CT) have recently received much attention in diverse media and policy agendas. This comes out of the clear role they play in environmental protection and sustainability and the large potential to contribute to economic growth and competitiveness. The realization of both potentials depends on the level diffusion and exploitation achieved, today very low. This article presents a selective survey of papers that today represent the general wisdom concerning the factors affecting adoption as a primary condition to diffusion and exploitation of CT. The paper helps to clarify the challenges facing diffusion modelers and policy makers when dealing with policy design, assessing the levels of dif- fusion achieved as well as the factors affecting diffusion of a particular technology. The paper ends outlining further research need in the field. Ó 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Technology adoption; Technology diffusion; Diffusion modeling; Technology policy; Environmental policy 1. Introduction During the first years of the of the 21st century the attention given to the state of the environment e at both local and global level e has increased dramatically compared to concern in the last years of the 20th century. We are seeing not only popular, commercial films, 1 but also national governments enacting policy directed to increasing awareness of issues, such as sys- temic pollution and climate change [1]. 2 It is only in the most recent years that governments have been regarding technolog- ical innovation as the solution to the challenge of environmen- tal degradation and a way of boosting the competitiveness of national economies [2,3]. Seeing technological innovation as the main means of providing environmental sustainability presents two major policy issues. The first concerns the fact that despite the raised awareness of the environmental prob- lems caused by production and consumption patterns there is little acceptance that the current technological stock presents serious anomalies in terms of infringement of the basic laws of thermodynamics, anomalies that extend to the new, so- called alternative technologies (e.g., photovoltaic cells, fuel cells, bio-fuels, etc.) [4,5]. The second issue relates to the myr- iad factors affecting the diffusion of new cleaner technologies and how these factors interact, which requires appropriate pol- icy mixes in order to minimise negative synergies and con- flicts. Often potentially relevant factors related to the adoption of new technologies have not been included in the analysis. The factors may differ between sectors but this has not been systematically studied. Often the study focuses on one industry. This limits generalisations and insights for policy. In this paper, we address this second issue in an attempt to make the adoption of new technologies by individual users, and their diffusion across the economy, more transparent by showing the dependency between the various factors involved and their likely interrelation. The paper makes clear the diffi- culty to generate a dynamic diffusion model that includes all the relevant variables. The objective is to highlight the chal- lenge involved in generating policies that promote the diffu- sion of cleaner technologies at the aggregated level. If diffusion is the outcome of the micro-decisions influenced * Tel.: þ31 15 269 5490. E-mail address: carlos.montalvo@tno.nl 1 See movie e ‘‘An inconvenient truth’’ http://www.climatecrisis.net/ and movie e ‘‘The 11th hour’’ http://wip.warnerbros.com/. 2 See Environmental Knowledge Hub, http://ekh.unep.org/?q ¼ node/2042, visited 10.09.2007. 0959-6526/$ - see front matter Ó 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jclepro.2007.10.002 ARTICLE IN PRESS Please cite this article in press as: Montalvo C, General wisdom concerning the factors affecting the adoption of cleaner technologies: a survey 1990e2007, J Clean Prod (2007), doi:10.1016/j.jclepro.2007.10.002 Available online at www.sciencedirect.com Journal of Cleaner Production xx (2007) 1e7 www.elsevier.com/locate/jclepro + MODEL