SMEs and barriers to Eco-innovation in the EU: exploring different firm profiles

Giovanni Marin, Alberto Marzucchi and Roberto Zoboli

Journal of Evolutionary Economics, 2015, vol. 25, issue 3, 705 pages

Abstract: Eco-innovation is an explicit aim of major EU policy strategies. Many environmental policies de facto require firms to eco-innovate to comply with policy requirements, while the overlap between policy-driven and market-driven eco-innovation strategies is increasingly important for many firms. Barriers to eco-innovation can then emerge as a critical factor in either preventing or stimulating EU strategies, policy implementation, and the green strategies of firms. In this paper we focus on EU-27 SMEs. We single out and explore different firm profiles, considering eco-innovation barriers and engagement. Our analysis is based on a particularly suitable dataset: the Eurobarometer survey on “Attitudes of European entrepreneurs towards eco-innovation”. We identify six clusters of SMEs. These clusters include firms facing either ‘Revealed barriers’ or ‘Deterring barriers’, ‘Cost deterred’ firms, ‘Market deterred’ firms, ‘Non eco-innovators’, and ‘Green champions’. The clusters display substantial differences in terms of eco-innovation adoption. We show that our taxonomy has little overlap with sector classifications. This diversity should be taken into account for successful environmental and innovation policies. Copyright Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2015

Keywords: Eco-innovation; Barriers to innovation; SMEs; Green strategy; JEL; O33; Q55 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (51)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s00191-015-0407-7 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:joevec:v:25:y:2015:i:3:p:671-705

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/191/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s00191-015-0407-7

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Evolutionary Economics is currently edited by Uwe Cantner, Elias Dinopoulos, Horst Hanusch and Luigi Orsenigo

More articles in Journal of Evolutionary Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().