Climate change is a serious threat to mankind. In order to fight it the international community has been encouraging green innovation in fields like green energy, transportation, reductions of greenhouse emissions and others. Financial, legislative, political, market and other factors may affect the degree of green innovation in a certain territory. The acknowledgement of green patents as essential for both fostering green innovation and spreading »green knowledge« resulted in special tagging schemes of green technology patents and fast-tracking green patent programs. Present work summarizes all main factors that may influence green innovation in general and in Slovenia. Due to the absence of one, commonly accepted definition of green innovation, green technology and green patents, we reviewed existing literature and created working definitions of the three terms. IPC Green Inventory list and Y02/Y04 tagging scheme hierarchy structures are also presented in this work. Furthermore, a comparison of Korean, UK and US fast-tracking green patent programs and their main features was made in order to determine the advantages and room for improvement of the programs overall. Finally, a statistical analysis of green patent applications and grants made by Slovenian inventors and applicants was performed in order to shed light on state of green innovation in Slovenia in the years from its independence until today.
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