Drivers of eco-innovations in Catalonian firms

Abstract

Innovations which reduce the environmental impact of production and consumption have been argued in the literature to play a relevant role in the path towards more competitive and environmentally sustainable societies. Identifying the main factors that activate and hinder firms’ decisions to eco-innovate in specific regions and in differentiated sectors can help policy-makers to implement suitable instruments to stimulate these determinants or to overcome these barriers. Over the past decade, many empirical papers have devoted attention on the drivers of eco-innovation at country level (Del Río et al., 2011; Díaz-García et al., 2015; Ghisetti et al., 2015; Hojnik and Ruzzier, 2015; Horbach, 2016, 2008), however, regional and sectoral analysis are still scarce (Del Río et al., 2016). Hence, the main purpose of this study is to analyse the drivers influencing the adoption of an eco-innovation in Catalonian firms. Catalonia is an interesting case to study for various reasons. Firstly, the region of Catalonia has the environment as a strategic priority and stands out by its pioneering role in the creation of an environmental quality label, or clean eco-label. Secondly, although many actions have been undertaken to promote innovation in the environment and the efficient use of energy resources between enterprises, the adoption rate is surprisingly unfavourable. For this reason, this article carries out an empirical analysis to offer useful proposals to design better environmental innovation policies. Furthermore, to overcome at least some of the limitations of earlier studies, which have used mainly cross-sectional databases, the empirical analysis carried out in this paper is based on the Technological Innovation Panel (PITEC), a panel data that incorporate an extensive sample of Catalonian firms that covers the period 2008—2015.  Hence, this study would provide novel results related to the temporal dimension in the literature on eco-innovation orientation.