the challenge is not only to encourage innovation in general but to steer the efforts and investments of innovators into fields of endeavor that are particularly critical for sustainable development the above market and coordination failures are typically exacerbated in these fields because many of the goods and benefits to be generated by innovation have public good properties and generate positive externalities themselves this means that the private incentives for engaging in innovation in these fields are attenuated even more than when innovation is applied to goods and services without sustainability attributes moreover because some of the benefits of innovations in fields critical for sustainable development will accrue to society at large rather than to the buyers of the respective products and services innovations in these fields are also likely to be taken up more slowly by customers