Following the trend on focusing on a nation’s economic-growth, side effects such as resource exhaustion, environmental pollution, and social injustice have begun to appear. As a solution, eco-innovation has received a great amount of attention from European countries and as a result, many efforts to analyze the development of eco-innovation quantitatively have been made. This study aims to evaluate the validity of an eco-innovation index developed to support the sustainable development goal. For this purpose, four factors of eco-innovation—capacity, supportive environment, activity, and performance—were applied to three categories of the Triple-Bottom-Line (TBL) concept in sustainability to compare the eco-innovation development level of 49 Asia-Europe Meeting countries. Factors for eco-innovation and TBL at the country level were organized in quartile and compared to see strength and weaknesses for each nation. In order to test if eco-innovation factors of a nation adequately reflect its sustainability, we used various comparisons of ANOVA. The results of this study are as follows: First, the one-way ANOVA tests present the scores for capacity, supportive environment, and performance as grouped into four quartiles in the same pattern as their economic, social, and environmental scores. The three-way ANOVA tests showed significance for the economic category. Scores for capacity, supportive environment, activity and performance were significant at a nation’s economic level. Lastly, the MANOVA test revealed that TBL significantly explains four eco-innovation factors. In addition, the eco-innovation performance level of European nations and Asian nations were compared. The possibility that many nations still have room to be competitive in their eco-innovation efforts was identified. Nations with unbalanced eco-innovation growth are urged to implement new strategies to balance their growth. Therefore, this research contributes to extending research on eco-innovation.

The author wishes to make the following correction to this paper [1].

In the global society eco-innovation emerged as an effort to implement sustainable development as outlined during the 2012 RIO+20 conference. States and firms have established and implemented policies and strategies for eco-innovation as one route to sustainable development. Eco-innovation has been facilitated in developed countries, especially OECD members and European countries through action plans. Recently eco-innovation policies are emerging in the developing countries. Based on this context, this research aims to analyze eco-innovation policies in Asian countries. We investigated policies related to sustainable development in 17 Asian countries with the categories of policy instruments. National policies were interpreted and compared with the classification of development stages according to the World Economic Forum (WEF). As a result this research indicates different approaches to eco-innovation in Asian countries. It offers insights to designing national strategies for eco-innovation in Asia's developing countries. Therefore this research can contribute to facilitating and diffusing eco-innovation toward sustainability in Asia.