Designing Innovation Policies to Promote the Sustainable Use of Resources. Does Eco-Innovation Still Matter?

Dear Colleagues,

The volatility of the market conditions inside an ever-changing globalized world necessitates permanent anticipation of demand shifts, resource constraints, and job market movements. Sustainable innovation is embedded in products, services, technologies, and even business models and organizational practices. The Brundtland report (1987) stated that present prosperity achievements and global cohesion should not pawn the legacy for future generations. Innovation is a key driver of economic growth at both the macroeconomic and microeconomic levels due to its role in comparative advantage creation. More recently, resource overconsumption, environmental depletion, and social inequality have forced a transition towards the development of a more sustainable ecosystem. There has been global political concern regarding environmental, social, and economic sustainability, forcing the supply to adapt their productive processes and outputs. Sustainability is no longer optional, but a key driver of responsible innovation processes and a pillar of corporate social responsibility. Evidence shows that resource preservation and economic development are compatible; however, policy recommendations have failed to be strong enough to promote this behavior as a rule rather than an exception. It is still necessary to promote innovative ecosystems in which the co-creation of value and sustainability emerge from the value chain involving the user-community, whose outputs meet the targets of the sustainable development goals. As a result, products, processes, and practices are developed with the target of creating social value along with increased economic returns, positively influencing sustainability challenges. Achieving sustainability is strongly tied to the adoption of eco-innovations given their environmentally friendly nature regarding goods services, processes or business models. Policy initiatives promoted by institutions worldwide (e.g., the European Union, Japan, North Korea) have forced firms to be aware of the potential benefits of promoting environmental efficiency and reducing environmental pressure through innovation. The challenges put to the world economies by the pandemic crisis require economic activity, consumption patterns, job markets, and competitiveness to be reassessed while simultaneously tackling global environmental challenges such as climate change and the depletion of natural resources. Countries are still being pushed toward increasingly settled economic activities that are in harmony with sustainable innovation. The centrality of these strategies requires the assessment of the impact of environmental policies on eco-innovation practices along with its efficacy to pursue greener growth. In doing so, valuable insight into sustainable innovation trends will be provided in management-related fields as well as in terms of policy actions. Also, assessment of the impacts of environmental policies on the promotion of sustainable product development that promotes inclusive ecosystems to generate welfare-productivity synergies is required. This Special issue will present a collection of research articles focused on sustainability-driven innovations to identify which policy instruments may work as enablers or withholders in the promotion of sustainable recovery. We are calling for papers that present theoretical approaches, applied research, and challenge-based work relevant to these issues.

Prof. Dr. João Carlos de Oliveira Matias
Prof. Dr. Joana Costa
Guest Editors

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• innovation policy
• sustainability
• eco-innovation
• resource management
• sustainability-driven innovation
• eco-efficiency
• circular economy
• industrial symbiosis
• clean production
• byproducts
• case studies
• green product development
• green industrial processes