Maïder Saint Jean

The dynamics of environmental innovations: three stylised trajectories of clean technology

In this article, we explore the dynamics of environmental innovations developed by firms to comply with environmental regulations. Our analysis is based on a micro-simulation model of industrial dynamics. The question arises: how do firms competing in the same industry deal with environmental issues without altering their productive efficiency or the performance of the product? We focus on clean technology which seeks to combine environmental and productive dimensions by way of innovation offsets. Our simulations show that an innovative strategy based on a good balance between environmental and productive dimensions takes more time to develop and needs to address a ‘competence destroying effect’. Finally, we study favourable conditions for the development of this type of clean technology and draw some policy implications.

Environmental innovation and clean technology: an evolutionary framework

This paper provides a framework for the analysis of clean technology which covers the factors inducing, stimulating and constraining environmental innovations of firms. Such a framework relies on recent empirical and theoretical contributions to environmental innovations. The representation of clean technology draws from several industrial case studies on the reduction of the emissions of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in the chemical and the metallurgical industries. Our conceptual background is based on the theoretical analysis of innovation put forward by evolutionary thinking. We provide an interpretation of clean technology in terms of trajectories guided by environmental innovations within the boundaries of particular paradigms. Such interpretation enables us to emphasise the sources of impediments to the adoption of clean technology and to underscore some policy implications. (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)