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Abstract
A growing body of literature concerns innovation persistence, but does not deal with environmental innovation, which is an important topic in the context of global warming. In this paper, we contribute to this literature by testing whether environmental innovators are persistent. Our empirical approach rests on the use of the Community Innovation Survey (CIS) 2008 and CIS 2010 data for firms from Luxembourg. Due to the lack of harmonisation, we are obliged to carry out a consistent statistical retreatment related to the data. Our probit models show that environmental technological innovators are persistent. The phenomenon of environmental innovation persistence is also positively affected by regulation and voluntary measures.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Supplemental data
Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here: https://doi.org/10.1080/09640568.2017.1397504.
Notes
1. See Del Río, Peñasco, and Romero-Jordán (Citation2016), Horbach, Rammer, and Rennings (Citation2012), and Rave, Goetzke, and Larch (Citation2011).
2. Geroski, Van Reenen, and Walters (Citation1997) also use the SPRU dataset on innovations selected by experts.
3. Moreover, two time periods often overlap for at least one year. If a firm innovates only for this year, it will be considered as innovating when it is not.
4. See also the recent work by Tavassoli and Karlsson (Citation2016).
5. Likewise for the strength of competition.
6. Statistical classification of economic activities in the European Community.
7. One item concerns a social issue: improving the health or safety of your employees. The other objectives are more market-oriented: increasing range of goods or services, replacing outdated products or processes, entering new markets or increasing market share, improving quality of goods or services, improving flexibility in producing goods or services, increasing capacity for producing goods or services, reducing labour costs per unit output. For each item, firms indicate the importance given to each objective (high, medium, low, or not relevant).
8. Whatever the type of innovation.
9. We note that the two periods overlap for one year. For the academics who use CIS, this difficulty is well known. We usually consider that it is not troublesome, while implying an over-representation of the population of persistent innovators.
10. When we observe the firms implementing these, we see approximately the same proportions of firms (144 or 145 firms among 374).
12. Firm internationalisation should also be an important factor (see Cainelli, Mazzanti, and Montresor Citation2012). Unfortunately, it is not included in our empirical model.
13. It takes the value 1 when competition in the market in which the firm is operating is very intense, and otherwise a value of 0.
14. We used the STATA software.
15. When we observe the firms implementing these, we see approximately the same proportions of firms (144 or 145 firms among 374).
16. A short overview of the population of innovators: of 374 firms, 64.7% were technological innovators in 2008–2010, and 53.8% in 2006–2008. Only 35.6% are persistent. Regarding the population of environmental technological innovators, we have 62 technological environmental innovators in 2006–2008, and 16 (25.8%) were still technological environmental innovators in 2008–2010.
17. We have calculated the variance inflation factor (VIF) with simple regression. The VIF is never greater than 1.5, except for the variables PREDIT_IMPACT08 and PREDIT_REDUC08, respectively, 2.01 and 2.09.
18. See question 7.1 in CIS 2008, http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/203647/203701/CIS_Survey_form_2008.pdf/e06a4c11-7535-4003-8e00-143228e1b308.
19. We thank a reviewer for drawing our attention to this aspect.