Eco-Innovation for Sustainability: Evidence from 49 Countries in Asia and Europe

Sustainability

Jang-Hwan Jo¹  Tae Woo Roh⁴  Seonghoon Kim³  Yeo-Chang Youn⁶  Mi Sun Park²  Ki Joo Han⁵  Eun Kyung Jang⁵ 

[1] Department of Forest Sciences, Seoul National University, 1 Gwanak-ro, Gwanak-gu, Seoul 08826, Korea;Interdisciplinary Program in Global Environmental Management, Seoul National University, 1 Gwanak-ro, Gwanak-gu, Seoul 08826, Korea;Graduate School of Business, Seoul National University, Gwanakro 1, Gwanakgu, Seoul 08826, Korea;;Department of International Trade and Commerce, Soonchunhyang University, 22 Soonchunhyangro, Shinchang-myeon, Asan-si, Chungcheongnam-do 336-745, KoreaEcoServices Consulting Co., Ltd., 3rd FL, 125 Ogeum-ro, Songpa-gu, Seoul 138-050, Korea;Department of Forest Sciences & Research Institute for Agriculture and Life Science, Seoul National University, 1 Gwanak-ro, Gwanak-gu, Seoul 08826, Korea;

关键词: eco-innovation;    sustainability;    Triple-Bottom-Line;    factors;   

DOI  :  10.3390/su71215849

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

Following the trend on focusing on a nation’s economic-growth, side effects such as resource exhaustion, environmental pollution, and social injustice have begun to appear. As a solution, eco-innovation has received a great amount of attention from European countries and as a result, many efforts to analyze the development of eco-innovation quantitatively have been made. This study aims to evaluate the validity of an eco-innovation index developed to support the sustainable development goal. For this purpose, four factors of eco-innovation—capacity, supportive environment, activity, and performance—were applied to three categories of the Triple-Bottom-Line (TBL) concept in sustainability to compare the eco-innovation development level of 49 Asia-Europe Meeting countries. Factors for eco-innovation and TBL at the country level were organized in quartile and compared to see strength and weaknesses for each nation. In order to test if eco-innovation factors of a nation adequately reflect its sustainability, we used various comparisons of ANOVA. The results of this study are as follows: First, the one-way ANOVA tests present the scores for capacity, supportive environment, and performance as grouped into four quartiles in the same pattern as their economic, social, and environmental scores. The three-way ANOVA tests showed significance for the economic category. Scores for capacity, supportive environment, activity and performance were significant at a nation’s economic level. Lastly, the MANOVA test revealed that TBL significantly explains four eco-innovation factors. In addition, the eco-innovation performance level of European nations and Asian nations were compared. The possibility that many nations still have room to be competitive in their eco-innovation efforts was identified. Nations with unbalanced eco-innovation growth are urged to implement new strategies to balance their growth. Therefore, this research contributes to extending research on eco-innovation.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© 2015 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.