Projects
Our work relateds to how countries and companies build clean energy economies under real political constraints. Here, we highlight three larger projects.
Green Industrial Strategy Project
The Green Industrial Strategy Project examines how business and government can create, scale, and compete in clean tech markets to accelerate decarbonization.
As clean technologies have entered the mass market, companies and countries have started to view decarbonization as an economic opportunity. They are pursuing strategies to compete in global clean technology markets. How do governments and companies develop strategies that enhance economic competitiveness and facilitate global decarbonization in a world of intensifying geo-economic competition?
Founded in 2025, the Green Industrial Strategy Project addresses this pressing question by supporting the theoretical, empirical, and practical study of green industrial strategy through collaborations involving scholars, practitioners, and policymakers. The project is a collaboration between the Institute for Business in Global Society (BiGS) at Harvard Business School and the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative (BESI) at UC Berkeley, with support from the Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Business.
Public Institutions for Cleantech Commercialization
PICC (read as 'pixie') is a collaborative research project between University of California, Berkeley and the University of Cambridge to examine institutions promoting the commercialisation of clean energy technologies in the European Union, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
The net-zero transition requires both deploying existing clean energy technologies and developing new ones. In particular, the decarbonisation of sectors with hard-to-abate emissions, such as cement, steel, chemicals, aviation, and shipping, depends on emerging technologies moving from lab to market. They must be commercialised at a much faster pace than their predecessors if reaching net-zero by 2050 is to remain feasible. Research on how government institutions contribute to innovation outcomes have mainly focused on R&D-focused agencies. The principal investigators' work has, for instance, shown how, and why, funding and institutions for clean energy R&D have evolved across major economies. At the same time, more recently governments have created new institutions for commercialising clean energy technologies that have yet to be comprehensively mapped and analysed.
Policymakers are thus ‘flying blind’ in building these institutions as they don’t have access to systematic knowledge about whether the solutions they adopt are effective or not. This makes understanding effective institutional design an urgent and important research goal. In pursuing it, the Public Institutions for Cleantech Commercialisation (PICC, read as "pixie") project aims to equip policymakers with a robust understanding of effective designs of public institutions for cleantech commercialization.
Incumbents and Challengers in the Energy Transition
Clean energy transitions reshape markets, creating winners and losers among firms. A central question for decarbonization is whether powerful incumbents will block, adapt to, or be displaced by technological change—and how politics mediates these outcomes. This research line investigates competitive dynamics between incumbent and challenger firms, examining how technology, market structure, and coalitional politics jointly determine the pace and pattern of decarbonization.
One strand develops a framework explaining cross-sectoral variation in transition speed, examining how technology availability and market barriers shape political competition between incumbent and challenger coalitions. A second strand investigates firm-level behavior, exploring how incumbents' green transition capacity—the distance between existing assets and those required for low-carbon alternatives—shapes their climate strategies across market, political, and public domains. A third strand leverages the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act to assess how green industrial policy reshapes competitive prospects for incumbents and challengers across decarbonization-relevant industries. A fourth strand theorizes how coalitional dynamics between incumbents and challengers evolve over the course of a transition, examining whether and how increasing returns from innovation transform initially adversarial relationships into broad pro-transition coalitions.
Together, this research advances understanding of how firm competition, corporate strategy, and coalitional politics shape the political economy of decarbonization.