The “Europe 2020” growth strategy set the goal of a transition to a “more intelligent, sustainable and inclusive Europe” for 2020. This policy was built around 5 themes: employment, innovation, environmental issues, education and social inclusion in a global and complete strategy. Within this frame, a more sustainable growth model would supposedly depend on the transitioning to more ecological production systems. This could lead to a “decoupling” between environmental pressures and economic growth. It appears namely that producing and adopting environmental innovations are key elements for firms to improve the sustainability of their production processes, under certain conditions. It seems that innovations are often integrated in the process (“clean production”) and that they are the only actions that have a measurable impact in terms of reducing the externalities which occur during the last steps in the production process («End-of-pipe technologies »).
Environmental innovation, company performance and financial constraints
Data provided through CASD (7)