A Balancing Act? Aligning Product Innovation and Production Efficiency through Eco-strategies

With an undifferentiated catchword ‘eco-innovation’ is a largely understudied area, but of high relevance to the society and companies given the strong focus especially by governments on grand challenges like climate change, green technologies and environmental challenges. The paper utilizes the 2009 European Manufacturing Survey for the Danish sub-sample including 335 manufacturing firms. Through factor analysis, the paper confirms three main focus areas of new product development in relation to production facilities: efficiency considerations, market attention and greening of innovation. Logistic regression analysis demonstrates that while market attention is important for new product development, green aspects of innovation and efficiency considerations for innovation are important for the energy efficiency of the production companies. Combining these models highlights that energy efficiency moderates the effect of market attention on new product development.
The paper therefore concludes that product innovation and energy efficiency is a balancing act, focusing on one will have detrimental effects on the other! These findings point to the conclusion that researchers and practitioners in innovation management have to take the specificities and interactions of different types of eco-innovation more carefully in consideration than so far and to formulate new managerial practices combining energy efficiency and product innovation.