Strategies for innovation and sustainability: determinants and effects of spanish and european firms
- Autores: Elisenda Jové Llopis
- Directores de la Tesis: Agustí Segarra i Blasco (dir. tes.)
- Lectura: En la Universitat Rovira i Virgili ( España ) en 2018
- Idioma: español
- Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Alex Coad (presid.), Mercedes Teruel Carrizosa (secret.), José García Quevedo (voc.)
- Programa de doctorado: Programa de Doctorado en Economía y Empresa por la Universidad Rovira i Virgili
- Materias:
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- Resumen
Since innovation has widely recognized by scholar and policy makers as an essential component of the performance of countries, industries and firms, the main aim of this doctoral thesis has been to provide new insights regarding the determinants and effects of the innovation strategies at firm level. Specially, part of this thesis has focus on analysing a particular innovation strategy such as eco-innovation strategy because environmental challenges that include among others global warming, natural resource depletion, pollution regulations and new consumers’ preferences for eco-friendly products are becoming a higher priority for policy makers. From the perspective of policy makers, the significant of these two topics –innovation and environmental innovations–has recognized in the Europe 2020 strategy that aims to create smart, sustainable and inclusive growth as a way to overcome structural weakness in the European economy and in its subsequent long-term goals to move towards a sustainable and lover low-carbon economy (the main roadmaps being a climate & energy framework by 2030 and a low carbon economy by 2050).
The thesis is structured in mainly three different but strictly related papers. Each of the essays is an empirical analysis that investigates one original research question, formulated to properly fill the gaps that emerged in previous literature.
The first paper, “What is the role of innovation strategies? Evidence from Spanish firms”, proposed an original strategic perspective on the determinants of innovation success starting from the motivations that drive a firm to engage in innovation activities. Since a typical firm is unable to undertake in all possible choice of innovation activities because of scarce resources the decisions made at this point constitute the innovation strategies of the firm, that is the choice of a firm’s long-term goals and resource allocation for the achievement of those goals. In the first study of the present thesis we examine which strategy has the greatest odds of improving innovation performance, and whether there is a fit between the innovation strategy pursued and innovation output measured in terms of product and process innovations. First, based on a principal component analysis a distinction between absence, mixed, or oriented strategy towards quality, production, cost and environment is made. Then, considering the longitudinal structure of the Spanish Technological Innovation Panel (PITEC) data source, a random effect probit model is used to examine the impact of these strategies. The evidence for Spanish firms suggests that a good innovation strategy can help firms to guide the innovation process and to achieve a durable competitive advantage in dynamics environments. Consequently, the main barrier to innovation success is the absence of a well-articulated innovation strategy among firms. The main implication of these findings is that public policies to encourage internal reflection within firms as the first step towards increasing their innovation success are essential in the Spanish context.
The green economy became a pillar of major European and international strategies mainly because of the continuing deterioration of the natural environment, most visible in terms of climate change and ecosystem degradation. An eco-innovation strategy is a key instrument towards a green economy, and is at the centre of the current European agenda. Consequently, we move on to investigating strategies to reduce environmental impacts, specifically in the second paper we examine the drivers of an eco-innovation orientation and, in last paper, continue by analysing the implications.
In the second study, “What spurs the decision to implement eco-motivations? A panel data analysis of Spanish service and manufacturing firms”, it emerged that eco-innovations share some similarities with general innovations but, for reasons considered in some depth (double externality problem), they also differ substantially in the drivers that foster their adoption. In general, these differences justify our analysis of the drivers of eco-innovation strategy, as the literature concentrates on the determinants of general innovations, leaving an important gap which our work addresses. Here, we make a significant contribution by incorporating in the analysis both sectoral and temporal dimension. Using a large panel of Spanish manufacturing and services firms over the period 2008–2014, we examine long-term relationships between variables, and study persistence in eco-innovation over time. Our identification of the main factors activating and hindering decisions to eco-innovate over time and in differentiated sectors, should help policy-makers design appropriate and effective instruments to stimulate these determinants, or overcome these barriers. The results indicate the importance of regulatory stimulus to eco-innovation for both service and manufacturing firms, but have also stressed that sectors diverge in the magnitude of their regulatory pressure. Furthermore, we find that eco-innovation is highly persistent at the firm level in both sectors. In contrast, market factors are not found to be a distinctive driver for eco-innovative firms.These results are of considerable interest for public policy attempting to promote an eco-orientation among Spanish firms. Since eco-innovations are characterized by the double externality problem, public policy retains a relevant role. We note that eco-innovations have both environmental and innovation externalities and that this poses a complex challenge for policy makers, since support requires a coordinated approach, one that integrates innovation, research and environmental policy. In this sense, the promotion of eco-innovation requires a balanced strategy that combines different policy tools.
Finally, in last paper, “Eco-strategies and firm growth in European SMEs: when does it pay to be green?”, we assess the economic consequences of adopting different resource efficient practices to be greener. On the one hand, the need for eco-strategies is continuously increasing. However, the primary incentive for an individual firm to invest in green strategies is that they are profitable (in which case, further policy interventions would be unnecessary). This motivated our firm level analysis, where the main research question was to understand, not only whether or not it generally pays to be green, but also in which cases, and for whom, it is worthwhile to be green. We used an extensive sample of SMEs, located across 28 European countries. We not only differentiated between typologies of resource efficiency practices, but also considered the intensity and the breadth of the eco-practices implemented. Clearly, green innovations are needed in the drive towards a sustainable economy. But our results indicate that that not all eco-strategies are positively related to better performance for European SMEs, at least not in the short term. Fostering the adoption of eco-strategies might be a good policy target as it might help both the environment and firms’ performance. However, policy makers should carefully identify which are the winning strategies or in other words which typologies of resource efficient practices they are willing to stimulates, as they engender heterogeneous gains. Moreover, we observed a U-shaped relationship between eco-strategies and firm growth, which indicates that a greater breadth of eco-strategies is associated with better firm performance. However, few European SMEs are able to either invest heavily or undertake multiple eco-strategies. This suggests that there is room for policy interventions aimed at raising awareness among SMEs of the advantages of making a minimum level of investment in eco-strategies, or in considering the possible positive synergies and interactions between different eco-practices.
