L’auto elettrica come innovazione radicale: alcune riflessioni sulla situazione attuale

Electric vehicles represent an innovation which is particularly important for the society because of its estimated positive effects on the environment. This innovation assumes the nature of radical or disruptive innovation that, following the literature, requires to become effective, definite conditions, in particular an innovation system more open to collaboration and able to efficiently select the better technology among the inventions produced by the research system. In this paper we look at the innovation in the automotive sector highlighting the dominant role still played by incumbents and the few attempts to make the sector more open and cooperative. Given the strong dynamics of the invention activity experimented in recent years, the main obstacles to the diffusion of electric vehicles seem connected to the innovation process and, in particular, to the problem of reaching a common technological standard.