The role of environmental innovation in firms’ sustainable strategies: a sample survey on Italian companies

Sustainable development is one of the main targets of the European Union (EU) that is already working on the definition of a European environmental politics that will allow an increase in market competitiveness encouraging the production of more ecological processes, products and services. Reaching and maintaining the objective of sustainable development must necessarily involve innovations capable of ensuring technological advances, since existing technologies, given the current level of global demand and pressure on natural resources, appear to be inadequate for achieving this objective in the medium-long term. Thus, sustainability requires a specific type of innovation, called eco-innovation, which may differ in that it affects organisations, products or processes. In this paper, a summary of a survey carried out on a selected sample of Italian companies, with the aim of focus on the relationship between environmental organizational innovation (e.g. environmental management systems) and technological environmental innovation (e.g. environmental product and process innovations), is presented.