Innovation and sustainability: the Italian scenario

Abstract

Recent public and governmental concerns regarding sustainability have increased attention on the possibility of improving firms’ efficiency in terms of the emerging topic of sustainable innovation. The perspective of what represents innovation has changed significantly in the pioneering and the wide usage of patent statistics. In fact, a large number of research papers have suggested significant advancements in the usage of indicators connected to measuring innovation (see, among others, Rothwel, 1992; Hagedoorn and Cloodt, 2003; Smith, 2005; Gössling and Rutten, 2007; Makkonen and Van der Have, 2013). One of the most frequently used set of indicators to assess the innovation level of European countries is the European Innovation Scoreboard (EIS; European Commission, 2020), while the Regional Innovation Scoreboard (RIS; European Commission, 2019) represents a regional extension of the EIS. Compared to EIS, the RIS assesses the innovation performance using a limited number of indicators. The fourth edition of the Oslo manual (OECD, 2018) proposed a detailed updated guideline focused on measuring innovation in the business sector, and Dziallas and Blind (2019) contributed to the literature review of innovation measurements by carrying out an extensive analysis. Nevertheless, there still remains a broad discussion on these issues. Sustainable innovation combines the innovation topic and the characteristics connected to sustainable development, which in turn involve three dimensions of sustainability: economic, social and environmental (or ecological) features (Sood and Tellis, 2005). These subjects can also be investigated considering several goals of sustainable development. Among others, CarrilloHermosilla et al. (2009; 2010) presented an overview of connections among innovation, ecological sustainability, eco-innovation and sustainable innovation. Since the research question connected to the impact of the innovation on sustainability is still open, the present work attempts to shed light upon this relationship, considering the Italian Regions. As for the theoretical model, the present article considers a higher order construct (Wetzels et al., 2009), also known as a hierarchical (component) model (HCM), which is based on the Structural Equation Model (SEM) Partial Least Squares (PLS) Path Modelling (PM). In the authors’ opinion, from a policy maker’s and managerial point of view, the possibility of improving firms’ efficiency in terms of several dimensions of sustainable innovation represents a relevant topic that must be investigated.