Essays on eco-innovation

Overview & Synopsis

Environmental innovation or eco-innovation is considered one of the most significant paradigm shifts in the innovation behaviour. The specificity of eco innovation lies in the fact that environmental improvement, in addition to technological advancement, is the main reason of its development. By combining these two objectives, eco-innovation has become one of primary tools in the search to solve the world’s environmental problems and sustainability challenges. Despite its prevalence, there is still more to be discovered within the eco-innovation literature. The drivers of and barriers to eco-innovation discussion is one of the most significant amongst all. More notably, the role of a firm’s social, technological, economic and organizational characteristics within the eco-innovation process has been little studied. With this Ph.D. thesis we aim to fill the existing gap with four distinct research articles. [...] Chapter 2 investigates, firstly, whether firms’ internal characteristics have an impact on the adoption of voluntary environmental standards. Secondly, the causal effect of adoption of environmental standards on the firms performance. Based on the empirical evidence obtained, we show that medium-size, high-tech manufacturing firms operating at the EU level and using quality standards are more likely to adopt these standards earlier. [...] In Chapter 3, we stressed the significance of a firm’s structural characteristics in another context and aimed at investigating the role these characteristics play in realization of product and/or process eco-innovation. [...] In Chapter 4 we moved forward the analyses conducted in Chapter 3 to another context and examined the influence of firm’s economic, technological, organisational capabilities on the eco-innovation behaviour for different types of product, process, organisational or marketing eco-innovators. The results of our empirical analyses point out the marginal impacts of firm’s characteristics changes with respect to type of eco-innovator. [...]