Innovation process and needs of sustainability driven small firms

Abstract

Traditional approaches to sustainable consumption and production emphasized addressing issues related to the natural environment and sustainability through optimizing existing products, processes and businesses. Even though the conventional wisdom suggests that young and new firms have greater advantages in innovation, there are few studies that address exploiting sustainable product ideas through new organizations. Therefore, this paper seeks to explore and characterize the innovation process of sustainability-driven small and young firms in the Netherlands, and reports on the results of an explorative study that involves the use of generative techniques during individual semi-structured interviews with entrepreneurs and intermediary organizations. The results suggest that the novelty and radicalness of an innovation and the development phase of a firm are important factors that influence how firms organize for innovation, manage their network and in-source knowledge necessary for the innovation.