Marco Cucculelli, Noemi Giampaoli, Matteo Renghini
Abstract The Net-Zero Industry Act (NZIA) is a key initiative of the European Union aimed at accelerating the green transition and strengthening the EU’s clean-tech industrial base. However, the adoption of net-zero technologies across firms, sectors and regions remains largely undocumented, mainly due to the limitations of conventional innovation metrics. This paper addresses this gap by operationalising the NZIA technology framework at the firm level and combining structured firm-level data with unstructured information extracted from corporate websites via large-scale web scraping. Focusing on Italian companies, we map the adoption of net-zero technologies by firms and, within adopters, identify firms that are also engaged in their technological development by integrating web-based signals with patent data. We document the geographical and sectoral distribution of adopters and developers and analyse the firm-level drivers associated with technology adoption and development. Our results show that web-based data are effective in identifying the adoption of net-zero technologies, but they need to be complemented with patent information to accurately capture technological development. These findings have important implications for the design of targeted, place-based industrial policies under the NZIA framework.