Date: Date & Time: Friday, 18.9.2026 @ 12:00 (GMT) / 13.00 (CEST)
Location: Online
Industrial policy has experienced a global resurgence, including within the energy sector. Unlike traditional trade-based interventions, modern green industrial policies (GIP) primarily incentivize the domestic innovation, manufacturing and deployment of novel low-carbon energy technologies. Despite the multi-billion dollar financial stakes involved, selecting successful technologies (‘winners’) in advance remains surprisingly understudied. Here, I propose a framework to identify winners from a global competition and a domestic competitive advantage perspective. I build on insights from recent innovation literature, to argue that structural (and thus inherent) technology characteristics can be used to identify likely winners at early stages of the technology cycle. The framework presented here can serve as heuristic for decision makers tasked with the hard question of which specific technologies to support. Rather than relying on early-stage market prices or hype cycles, this framework provides a more structured basis for evaluating technologies and designing green industrial policy mixes. The talk will be based on the following paper but also include a preview into ongoing research: Schmidt, T. S. (2026). Towards technology-smart green industrial policy. Nature Energy, https://rdcu.be/fBeIu.
Bio: Prof. Tobias Schmidt is Professor of Energy and Technology Policy and also serves as the Founding Director of the Albert Einstein School of Public Policy at ETH Zurich. In his research, he analyzes the interaction of energy policy (and its underlying politics) with technological change in the energy sector. His research covers low to high income countries. Tobias holds a Bachelor of Science and Dipl. Ing. (MSc equivalent) in electrical engineering (energy focus) from the external page Technical University Munich and a PhD from ETH Zurich in management, technology, and economics, working with SusTec. He was a visiting researcher at Tokyo Tech, Utrecht (both in 2011), Stanford (2013/14), and Princeton (2022) universities. In his leisure he enjoys skiing (winter), hiking and catamaran sailing (summer), as well as singing and playing the piano (all year round). He has been a fan of FC Bayern Muenchen for more than 30 years.
How to join the seminar via the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) platform:
– Registration is required, but you’ll only need to register once for the entire series.
– You’ll need a My ECPR account to register: https://ecpr.eu/Login.aspx
– All seminars in the series will be automatically added to your itinerary.
– Your itinerary is available through “My Events” in “My ECPR”
– A link to join the session will appear in your itinerary 15-minutes before the start of the session
🔗 Details & Registration: https://ecpr.eu/Events/Event/PanelDetails/18058