Exploring sustainable innovation in "DIRTY Environmental" unsustainable markets
2014
Many initiatives designed at encouraging consumers to use less resources or organisations to
produce less environmentally damaging products and processes have failed or have been only slowly
adopted. This article examines two case studies with the first case examining the issues of how a
major environmental waste management company manages the development of new, innovative
hazardous environmental waste management solutions with a major pharmaceutical client and thesecond case evaluating the issues surrounding a major European automobile manufacturer
developing and launching an innovative range of environmentally friendly automobiles. The aim of
the study is to identify how sustainability ideas, products and processes are developed within these
two industry settings. In both cases end consumers play a very limited role in sustainability
innovation development and are rarely consulted or even aware of the organisations decision
making. This reflects a one sided supplier-push form of new product development long since defunct
in other areas of innovation, which may go some way to explaining their lack of diffusion. We also
find however that sustainability innovations are founded on complex interacting network processes
involving many parties with differing objectives. In particular we find a recurring negative
relationship between regulators and sustainable innovation diffusion.
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