Enhancing Ecoinnovation Performance: Evidence From a Water Footprint Assessment in the Manufacturing Industry

The unprecedented global environmental crisis we are facing nowadays is pushing the economic actors to rethink their approach to sustainable development. As a consequence, firms are increasingly adopting and implementing ecoinnovations in their processes in order to improve the management of scarce natural resources. This paper describes a method to assess the water footprint (WF) in the manufacturing industry. Data are collected from two manufacturing plants of Volvo (Umea and Tuve) in Sweden and constitute the baseline scenario against which seven new scenarios are tested. Such new scenarios describe the implementation of seven different technologies into the water management system of the organization. A combination of key performance indicators is instrumental to generate the WF of each scenario. Through this method, we are able to disentangle which technological change can pave the way toward a substantial improvement of the organizational WF.