This work explores the transition process towards a circular economic model in the European context. By placing the role of policies and waste as a focus of the debate, it first examines the possible effects that a stringent policy can generate and, secondly, how much waste and its management can influence the goodness of the transition process. By analyzing European data on major indicators of circularity, waste generation, and management, this paper attempts to provide a snapshot of the European situation and its different speeds along the transition path. In light of the recent development programs established by European institutions in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic that strained the world economy, the trends show how program resources should be directed towards key sustainability sectors that can stimulate European countries towards a common circular pathway.

The circular revolution has emerged as one of the greatest current and future challenges for Europe and globally. In this new paradigm shift, everyone is called to contribute, from consumers to firms. Small and medium-sized firms, thanks to their size, dynamism, and strong presence across Europe, can play an active role in driving change. Their innovative activities/approaches can guide them both toward a circular future and toward the path of sustainable growth. This work aims to analyze the drivers that push firms to adopt a circular innovation path, using data from a two-period survey of Italian manufacturing SMEs. By focusing on key variables identified in the literature, the results demonstrate a certain heterogeneity among the drivers influencing the five categories of circular innovation considered.

This paper investigates a previously under-explored topic: the impact of Secondary Raw Materials use on firm performance. To this end we construct an original dataset on Italian firms by combining data from a newly developed survey with existing AIDA data covering the period 2021-2022. Focusing on turnover growth as our performance metric, we assess whether firms that adopt secondary raw materials experience different growth trajectories compared to those that do not. To identify the impact under scrutiny, we employ a Propensity Score Matching approach, accounting for other relevant drivers of turnover change over time, such as R&D, number of employees, access to public funds and entrepreneurial education. Our findings suggest that firms integrating secondary raw materials in their production processes tend to perform better in terms of turnover growth, with SRM adopting firms featuring a 10% higher turnover growth in the years under scrutiny. However, the effect appears to be sector-specific, highlighting the role of industry characteristics in determining the benefits of secondary raw material use. Additional dimensions of performance, i.e. water and resource savings, are also analyzed, confirming the presence of sector level evidence and suggesting sector specific policy needs.

The present study provides a useful overview of the state of innovation and eco-innovation in the European Union. It does so by studying and understanding the performance, trends, descriptive spatial patterns and convergence of the main indicators adopted to this purpose, them being the European Innovation Scoreboard (EIS), also inclusive of the Regional Innovation Scoreboard (RIS) and the Eco-Innovation Index (EI). While the analysis involves all 27 EU members, it also provides a focus on four countries (Italy, Spain, Greece and Lithuania). These are illustrative project-driven case studies, as they have recently launched a common research effort aimed at promoting innovation-based resilience in the EU’s agrifood sector, named the SOSFood Project, facing the topic of innovation from a multidisciplinary and multiregional perspective. To better understand innovation trends, the paper presents an elaborate descriptive analysis and mapping of the most representative sub-indicators at a national and regional (NUTS-2) level, plus a convergence analysis through the adoption of the Phillips–Sul method. The analysis shows multifaceted results suggesting a differentiated catching up (where, by “catching up”, we refer to the achievement of more homogeneous innovation standards in many areas of the continent), resulting in a club convergence of EU members, where countries tend to be clustered based on regional location, although substantial differences arise depending on the specific indicator (innovation or eco-innovation) and sub-indicator subject to the analysis. Our work provides a clear visualisation of recent innovation and eco-innovation trends that can be of good use for analysts, researchers and policy makers interested in understanding where, how much and in what form innovation is most consolidated and opens an avenue to further research aimed at understanding where it is most needed.