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Eco‐innovations of corporations are seen to contribute to the mitigation of negative impacts on the natural environment. However, despite environmental gains, some eco‐innovations fail in the marketplace while others succeed. We propose a framework that reflects the connection between eco‐innovations and their social license to operate. Corporations can increase the market success of eco‐innovations if they can gain a social license to operate based on fair and trustworthy stakeholder engagement shaped by the context of their societal environment. Eco‐innovations can be transformed following management steps of an internal and external evaluation, the analysis of companies' interactional status, and conformation activities for the introduction of sustainability‐oriented innovations. We conclude that the successful transformation of eco‐innovations requires the inclusion of social factors, such as stakeholders' multiple claims, to secure a social license to operate and thereby even reduce costs by avoiding sketchy corporate social responsibility measures. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment

Is small really beautiful? A review of the concept of niches in innovation This article reviews the concept of innovation niches through three categories: strategic niche management (SNM), specialised markets and niches formed as a technology declines. In the literature, innovation niches generate interest from both innovation and marketing perspectives. This review focuses predominately on the former from which the niche types have been adopted and analysed. Mostly, contributions since 1980 have been included, representing the period of academic interest in innovative small firms, while both temporal and locational filters were applied to the study. It is noted that SNM has been proposed as a means to protect potentially useful innovations from full market competition, while specialist niches supply technologies to few customers in more stable environments. Incumbent technologies at the stage of decline may also retreat to niches where they can still remain competitive. Finally, it is suggested that further research on innovation niches would extend our understanding of technology dynamics.

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