Innovation is a key factor in firms achieving a better environmental performance, to the extent that it helps increasing the material/energy efficiency of production processes and reducing emission/effluents associated with outputs. The scope of the paper is twofold. First, new evidence is provided by testing a set of hypotheses, with regard to the influence of a wide array of innovation drivers. Secondly, we analyse the hypothesis of a complementarily relationship with regard to both different environmental innovation outputs and innovation drivers, such as R&D, policy related costs, auditing schemes and networking firm activity.
The applied investigation shows that usual structural characteristics of the firm and performances appear to matter less than eco auditing, R&D, policy related costs, and also organisational flatness and innovative oriented industrial relations. As far as innovation outputs are concerned, the correlation analysis shows that firms which do innovate tend to pursue different environmental innovations jointly. Positive correlations emerge in consistency with expectations. At the level of innovation drivers, we observe that the complementarity link, though predominant across the various analysed couples of drivers, is associated with more heterogeneous evidence, sensitive to the typology of innovation and investigated drivers. As far as the analysis of complementarity is concerned, our results show that the hypothesis of complementarity generally holds.
Although our analysis overall supports the hypothesis of correlation/complementarity between drivers, we even find cases where such main drivers, policy related costs, R&D, networking and auditing, are not complementary. This kind of analysis is extremely relevant for feeding policy making at the level of firms or districts.
Thus, though relevant for explaining innovation dynamics, and crucial for informing management and policy efforts complementarity is then not the all inclusive panacea for tackling the complexity of the environmental innovation system, both from the management and the policy action sides.