Elsevier

Journal of Cleaner Production

Volume 174, 10 February 2018, Pages 502-526
Journal of Cleaner Production

Review
Contemporary corporate eco-innovation research: A systematic review

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2017.10.314Get rights and content

Highlights

  • We present a descriptive overview on eco-innovation in the corporate environment

  • We identify nine focusing areas and the transition of research hotspots

  • We unearth correlations of research topics based on the extended D→S→P→P framework.

  • We provide future research directions for subsequent eco-innovation research

Abstract

Interest in eco-innovation in the corporate environment has grown considerably in recent years. Given the profound role of eco-innovation, it is therefore important to obtain a better understanding on the latest research progress in the academia and the recent organizational efforts in practice. This review paper addresses this need and contributes to the current literature in three ways. First, this paper presents a descriptive overview on eco-innovation in the corporate environment by examining 395 representative articles published from 2006 to 2015, collected from the Social Citation Index Expanded and Social Sciences Citation Index databases. The characteristics of the terminologies and journals, prevailing themes and changes, the geographical location of prolific authors and main geographical context of research studies in eco-innovation are identified to unravel the evolution of the concerned research studies and institutional contexts. Second, by using co-word and social network analyses, this study finds that the current literature on eco-innovation in the corporate environment is mainly focused on nine areas, including the influence of stakeholders, drivers of eco-innovation, eco-innovation systems, eco-design, new product developments, product service systems, environmental management systems, green supply chain management, and performance & small medium enterprises (SMEs). Third, this study provides an extended conceptual framework that incorporates the notion of ‘driver→source→position→performance’ (D→S→P→P) to find the relationships among the research topics in the eco-innovation field. This framework allows examination of the overall strategies for eco-innovation in the corporate environment so that a firm can gain a competitive edge through their adoption, implementation, assessment, and investment. This systematic review will benefit practitioners and academics by providing the major strands of research in the current studies on eco-innovation. This study also provides insights into four distinctive features of eco-innovation in the corporate environment as well as research gaps of recent eco-innovation studies. This study thus provides future research directions for subsequent eco-innovation research, as well as insights for managers and policy makers on how to enhance and strategize strategies for eco-innovation in the corporate environment.

Introduction

In the past decades, irreversible climate changes, prevalence of environmental pollution, and increasing resource scarcity have progressed at an alarming speed and become a major concern of society. Companies, especially those in the pollution intensive industries, are portrayed to be the main contributors to the current environmental state. However, pressure from the government and market incentives has compelled companies to be innovative in their business operations in the pursuit of both economic and environmental goals.

Innovation is concerned with both change and novelty (Tidd et al., 2001). Since the Brundtland report which emphasizes the importance of environmentally sound technologies (World Commission on Environmental and Development, 1987) in 1987, a debate on the adoption of eco-innovation (EI) has emerged for corporate sustainability (Klewitz and Hansen, 2014). Since 2000, the diffusion of EI in the corporate setting in practice and its related research began to emerge (Karakaya et al., 2014). Recently, EI in the corporate setting has drawn increasing more attention in the academics and practices at the global, country, industry, firm, and customer levels. As a result, the adoption of EI is spreading among companies in supply chain networks. Different solutions are created to reduce the environmental impact in various stages of the supply chain from production, consumption, to disposal (Jabbour et al., 2015a, Jabbour et al., 2015b). Corporate management alternatives and public policy also play an important role in accelerating EI development and adoption (Daddi et al., 2016). Companies are increasingly adopting EI practices by integrating them into their corporate strategies to improve corporate competitiveness. However, the recent efforts of firms on EI remain ambiguous, as well as how firms might manage EI to gain a competitive advantage, and most importantly, the future research directions that can advance the development and knowledge of EI to reduce environmental impacts. To address these issues, we have conducted a systematic review of the current EI literature to provide a better understanding of the development in this area, while also pinpointing important research areas of EI.

In the extant literature, there are a few studies that discuss the evolution of EI in the corporate environment. The previous works are general in nature and limited to specific perspectives. For example, Bossle et al. (2016) examined the external and internal factors that drive firms to adopt EI. In a similar vein, Diaz-Garcia et al. (2015) proposed a framework to better understand the impact of the drivers of EI among the macro (country), meso (industry) and micro (firm) perspectives. Further, Del Río et al. (2016) and De Medeiros et al. (2014) only examined determinants at the firm-level and critical success factors of EI. Therefore, it is evident that these earlier review studies have predominately focused on the drivers and barriers of EI.

On the other hand, recent review studies have also examined a subset of issues of EI in the corporate environment, including environmental technological changes and process innovation (Popp et al., 2010). Similarly, Barbieri et al. (2016) examined related research and identified the determinants, economic and environmental effects, and policy inducement of EI. Although there have been attempts to produce an in-depth overview of research work on EI, the existing review works have only managed to provide fragments of insights into the development of EI which fails to contribute to determining future research directions of developing and implementing EI in practice.

To address the research gaps, this study systematically reviews related research on EI in the corporate environment to provide an overall summary of the current body of knowledge and establish a conceptual framework that captures the emergent themes. After summarizing the related literature published from 2006 to 2015, we first present the latest academic research advancements which include characteristics of the terminologies and journals, prevailing themes and changes, and geographical location of prolific authors and main geographical context of the studies. Second, we ascertain the major concerns of companies and future research directions in a holistic manner. Based on a modified version of the ‘driver→source→position→performance’ (D-S-P-P) framework, we organize the literature on EI to reveal the current positions, unique features, and research gaps, and navigate future pathways of research and practices of EI in the corporate environment.

Section snippets

Theoretical background

To lay the groundwork for the subsequent literature review, we summarized the definitions and conceptualizations of EI in the extant literature. Fussler and James (1996) first defined EI as “the process of developing new products, processes or services which provide customer and business value but significantly decrease environmental impact”. A decade later, Kemp and Pearson (2007) revised the definition of EI as “the production, assimilation or exploitation of a product, production process,

Research method

This study adopts the review protocols outlined in prior studies, including Jones, 2004, Seuring and Müller, 2008, and Tranfield et al. (2003). The protocols contain four steps: first, the problem and review protocol are defined and determined, the documents are then selected, followed by a thorough read and evaluation and finally, a synthesis analysis is implemented to realize a conceptual framework. Fig. 2 shows the design of the research protocol for the systematic review. This protocol will

Trends of terminology and identification of journals

As mentioned above, we searched for and read papers on the four applicable areas of this research, namely eco-innovation, environmental innovation, green innovation and sustainable innovation for their distribution across the studied timeframe. There appears to be a steady increase of published articles on these four areas as shown in Fig. 4. However, “environmental innovation” is used more frequently than “green innovation” and “sustainable innovation” during the past ten years and was the

Co-word analysis

Using the Bibexcel package, we obtained 1181 keywords and their frequency of occurrence based on the sample of 395 articles. Keywords like “innovation” (appears 39 times) and “environment” (10 times) are overly general to provide insights into EI, and were thus excluded. Geographical keywords like “China” (7), “Spain” (5) and “Taiwan” (4) were not used for clustering but will be additionally discussed in the following discussions. Moreover, some keywords needed to be standardized for further

Towards a conceptual framework

To systematically analyze and advance the theoretical development and practices of EI in corporate settings, we followed the source→position→performance framework in Day and Wensley (1988). This framework was originally used for diagnosing the competitive superiority of firms. The creation and sustainability of corporate competitiveness are the outcomes of a long-run feedback through underlying advantages in source, position, performance and investment cycle. This pattern was first adapted by

Discussion

Research on EI in the corporate environment has significantly increased, particularly in the last decade. As noted in the bibliographic analysis, the compilation of the EI literature reveals the multi-disciplinary nature of research on EI, increasingly more empirical paradigms, and diverse geographical contexts of the investigations. Based on the co-word and social analyses, the findings also reveal that existing research could be clustered into nine subtopics. Although thematic multiplicities

Conclusions

The objective of this study is to review previous research works related to EI in the corporate environment. Over the last decade, our understanding and appreciation of EI in the corporate setting have grown tremendously. A systematic review of the literature on EI from 2006 to 2015 reveals four EI related terminologies and various journals, prevailing themes and trends of research on EI, geographical location of prolific authors, and geographical context of the studies. This paper also

Acknowledgements

This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 71471047), the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong Special Administration Region (Grant No. GRF PolyU 152031/17B) and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (Grant No. G-SB54).

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