Eco-innovation is still a young area of research; however it has been an area of increasing concern for policy makers, academics and practitioners. The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of the existing body of literature on eco-innovations, and identify the most relevant publications in the field and the topics of interest. We have carried out a review of previous literature based on a Scopus search and selecting the discipline “Social Sciences and Humanities”. The search offers us 384 articles. From their analysis, it can be observed that there is a clear increase in the relevance of this issue within academia and several thematic trends arise in eco-innovation research, with drivers of eco-innovation being the most popular. Our main theoretical contribution is the development of a multilevel framework of eco-innovation drivers, with our literature review having a specific focus on systematizing the findings of the studies within this theme.

There is increasing social and political awareness of the importance of developing environmental responsibility at a corporate level. When focusing on issues of responsibility, large companies are frequently perceived to be more responsible for driving climate change and resource depletion. However, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) contribute significantly to the use of resources such as material and energy and produce approximately 64% of the pollution in Europe. Drawing on evidence from “The Eurobarometer 381 Survey on SMEs, Resource Efficiency and Green Markets”, we analyze the environmental responsibility of European SMEs, studying their compliance with environmental legislation and how several factors drive environmental orientation among SMEs. Our sample consists of 3647 SMEs operating in 38 countries. Only around a fifth of the firms go beyond environmental regulations, showing the highest levels of environmental responsibility. We conduct OLS regressions to analyze the factors that affect a positive environmental attitude among European SMEs (internal drivers being more significant than external ones) and then, to observe the positive effect of environmental responsibility and firm’s experience in offering green services/products on performance, although a conjoint effect was not found. Implications for practitioners, academics, and policy-makers are outlined.

Companies’ environmental responsibility has significantly increased in the last decade. However, the question about the benefits that this responsible decision has on the company’s performance in the market remains. In this scenario, the main goal of this study is to analyze the conditions that improve the performance of companies in the agri-food industry, paying specific attention to technological eco-innovation and different types of cooperation (in the use and in the development of eco-innovations). Our initial sample contains data of agri-food companies operating in Spain. The Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) has been used as a new path for the analysis of firm’s data. Company performance has been considered by using a construct including three variables (increase in the sales, company profitability and cost reduction). Results show that the conditions that largely benefit company performance are R&D spending and the development of technological eco-innovation. Cooperation in the development and use of eco-innovations are especially important for the smaller companies, with the larger companies in the sector relying both in cooperation and in their own resources. The different recipes which improve the performance, as well as the sustainability of the sector, are presented in this study.

This paper investigates the linkages between pressure from stakeholders, eco‐innovation and environmental performance considering the moderating role of being a cooperative. Using survey data from 239 Spanish companies we developed a model of structural equations to verify the relationship between the variables. We show that the implementation of eco‐innovations, driven by pressure from internal stakeholders, leads to better environmental performance. In addition, our results strengthen previous empirical evidence about the compromise of cooperatives with the community, workers, and the environment: they are influenced by both internal and external stakeholders in the implementation of eco‐innovations, while limited liability companies are influenced only by internal stakeholders.