Drivers of multidimensional eco-innovation: empirical evidence from the Brazilian industry

Abstract

The study analyses the relationships between the main drivers of eco-innovation introduced by innovative industries, focused on cooperation strategy. Eco-innovation is analysed by means of a multidimensional identification strategy, showing the relationships between the independent variables and the variable of interest. The literature discussing environmental innovation is different from the one discussing other types of innovation inasmuch as it seeks to grasp its determinants and to mostly highlight the relevance of environmental regulation. The key feature of this paper is that it ascribes special relevance to cooperation strategy with external partners and to the propensity of innovative industry introducing eco-innovation. A sample of 35,060 Brazilian industries were analysed, between 2003 and 2011, by means of Binomial, Multinomial and Ordinal logistic regressions with microdata collected with the research and innovation department (PINTEC) from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística). The econometric results estimated by the Logit Multinomial method suggest that the cooperation with external partners practiced by innovative industries facilitates the adoption of eco-innovation in dimension 01 with probability of 64.59%, 57.63% in dimension 02 and 81.02% in dimension 03. The data reveal that the higher the degree of eco-innovation complexity, the harder industries seek to obtain cooperation with external partners. When calculating with the Logit Ordinal and Binomial models, cooperation increases the probability that the industry is eco-innovative in 65.09% and 89.34%, respectively. Environmental regulation and innovation in product and information management were also positively correlated as drivers of eco-innovation.

Improving Firms’ Performance and Sustainability: The Case of Eco-Innovation in the Agri-Food Industry

“…The positive effect of cooperation in company efficiency and profits has been proved [43]. Cooperation has recently been identified as a driver for the development of eco-innovations in the manufacturing sector [82,83], in the fertilizer and agricultural sector [84] and for the introduction of radical eco-innovations specifically in the agri-food sector [10].…”

Do European firms obey the rules? Environmental innovativeness in light of institutional frameworks

“…Firms are motivated to engage in environmentally innovative activities mostly by demand factors, cost savings, subsidies, and regulations (Horbach 2008;Demirel and Kesidou 2011;Horbach, Rammer, and Rennings 2012;Kesidou and Demirel 2012;Horbach, Oltra, and Belin 2013;Borghesi, Cainelli, and Mazzanti 2015;Díaz-García, González-Moreno, and Sáez-Martínez 2015;Horbach 2016;Del Río, Romero-Jordán, and Peñasco 2017;Hojnik 2017;Cai and Li 2018;Da Silva Rabêlo and De Azevedo Melo 2019). Regulations are found to be most effective in increasing eco-innovations in less innovative firms (Kesidou and Demirel 2012), in impacting end-of-pipe pollution control technologies, as well as environmental R&D Kesidou 2011).…”

Cooperation as the Secret Ingredient in the Recipe to Foster Internal Technological Eco-Innovation in the Agri-Food Industry

“…Cooperation improves firm efficiency and profits [76], and it is also considered an essential part of the open innovation concept [16]. Cooperation with partners has recently been identified as a driver for the development of eco-innovations in the manufacturing sector in general [95,96] and for the introduction of radical eco-innovations, specifically in the food and beverage sector [16]. Other conditions, such as firm size or technological capabilities, are only important in configurations that include companies that belong to a company group and have high capital ratio and/or profitability (configurations 3 and 4, Table 6), but the percentage of food firms is lower (around 2.7 and 3.2 percent, respectively).…”

“…Although the number of studies about eco-innovation has significantly increased in the last decade [2], some aspects about companies' eco-innovation drivers and conditions remain unclear. In general, studies have focused on the whole industrial sector [61,93,96], with few paying attention to specific sectors, such as the agri-food industry [16]. Regarding specific eco-innovations, the differences between product and process eco-innovations are persistent in the current studies.…”