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<p>As a driver of innovation, university research plays an important role in the transition to a more sustainable future. Yet the role of PhD researchers in fostering green innovation remains underexplored. This study examines how PhD graduates contribute to green technology transfer by linking their academic and inventive outputs. Focusing on German PhD recipients in two fields of research (physics, and electrical engineering and computer science), we construct a new record linkage connecting PhD theses, scientific publications, patents, and patent-to-publication citations. To consistently identify research output related to environmental sustainability across document types, we use SPECTER2.0 embeddings to construct a semantic similarity–based measure of sustainability in PhD theses and patents, utilizing a curated corpus of publications. Our findings offer insights into how PhDs contribute to green innovation, both directly as inventors and indirectly through citations of their academic research in patents. We find that environmental sustainability-oriented PhDs are more frequently associated with green patenting, and that indirect contributions via citations received in patents are much more prevalent than direct contributions via patenting. We discuss and address potential limitations stemming from the absence of a direct benchmark through comparisons to established classification schemes, robustness checks, and qualitative analyses.</p>

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From green thesis to green invention: tracing the contribution of PhDs to green technology transfer of german universities

  • 期刊论文

  • 出版模式：

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  • 发表日期：

    2026年7月21日

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  • Guido Buenstorf,
  • Alana Hindiyeh,
  • Johannes Koenig,
  • Liam Paul Neumann,
  • Burcu Ozgun

摘要

As a driver of innovation, university research plays an important role in the transition to a more sustainable future. Yet the role of PhD researchers in fostering green innovation remains underexplored. This study examines how PhD graduates contribute to green technology transfer by linking their academic and inventive outputs. Focusing on German PhD recipients in two fields of research (physics, and electrical engineering and computer science), we construct a new record linkage connecting PhD theses, scientific publications, patents, and patent-to-publication citations. To consistently identify research output related to environmental sustainability across document types, we use SPECTER2.0 embeddings to construct a semantic similarity–based measure of sustainability in PhD theses and patents, utilizing a curated corpus of publications. Our findings offer insights into how PhDs contribute to green innovation, both directly as inventors and indirectly through citations of their academic research in patents. We find that environmental sustainability-oriented PhDs are more frequently associated with green patenting, and that indirect contributions via citations received in patents are much more prevalent than direct contributions via patenting. We discuss and address potential limitations stemming from the absence of a direct benchmark through comparisons to established classification schemes, robustness checks, and qualitative analyses.