Dimensions of environmentally sustainable innovation: the structure of eco‐innovation concepts

Abstract The present study analyses environmentally sustainable innovation, or eco‐innovation for short, from the perspective of extant theories of innovation, in order to establish dominant structures of such innovations and current weaknesses, as well as fruitful ways forward. 105 venture concepts were sampled from the winning contributions of a national environmental innovation competition, and analysed in terms of Schumpeterian innovation type and innovation mode (radical–incremental and component–architectural). The resulting distribution confirms a bias towards incremental process innovations, but points towards interesting characteristics in radical–architectural modes of eco‐innovation, e.g. the tendency to combine ‘hardware’ and ‘software’, or technology and social arrangements, the combination of generically diverse technologies and finally the ‘eco‐enabling’ of old technologies by the application of new ones. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.