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This paper aims to examine whether consumers respond differently to different types of eco-innovations and to explore how and under what conditions eco-friendly consumer innovativeness (ECI) impacts consumers’ perception and adoption intentions.

Two online experiments with real consumers in the USA were conducted to test the hypothesized relationships. Two eco-innovation products were examined: a connected vacuum cleaner (Study 1) and an innovative smartphone (Study 2).

First, consumers tend to express more positive product beliefs, higher preferences and stronger adoption intentions toward resource use elimination innovations compared with the other types of eco-innovations across two product categories. Although consumers are not willing to pay more, they would adjust their payment equity by increasing consumption levels for resource use elimination innovations. Second, this research demonstrates ECI affects adoption intentions via formulating consumer perceptions of product eco-friendliness. Perceived trade-offs between eco-friendly benefits and product effectiveness strengthens the positive effect of ECI while weakening the impact of perceived product eco-friendliness on adoption intentions.

Future studies may validate and extend the results for marketing communication to different types of eco-friendly innovative consumers to determine which marketing messages best match the perceptions and preferences of certain eco-friendly innovative consumers.

This study offers useful insights for strategic research-and-development investment and decision-making processes in selecting the best-suited approaches to developing eco-innovations and maximizing their success in the commercialization phase. Specifically, firms should place greater emphasis on resource use elimination innovation, which could evoke more positive consumer responses than resource use efficiency innovations and resource use substitution innovations. Moreover, it is important to improve the segmentation of the early adopters in the eco-innovation market with respect to specific types of eco-innovations so that marketers can distinctively address eco-friendly innovative consumers that best fit the potential user profile of their products.

The current research is novel as neither an empirically nor a theoretically founded framework has been suggested to examine how and why consumers respond differently to different types of eco-innovations. The findings shine new lights on eco-innovation research by providing useful insights into the underlying mechanisms and the conditions under which ECI affects consumers’ responses.

Knowledge of green consumer behavior is important for environmental and business reasons. The purpose of this study is to examine the determinants of green curtailment behaviors and consumer adoption of innovations marketed as green (eco‐innovations), and to analyze factors explaining these two types of green behaviors.

The results from a survey on adopters and non‐adopters (n=1,832) of alternative fuel vehicles (AFVs) are reported. Regression analysis on willingness to curtail car use and willingness to adopt a so‐called environmentally friendly car are used to identify significant determinants across the behavioral categories.

The results show that values, beliefs, norms, and habit strength determine willingness to curtail and willingness for eco‐innovation adoption. Personal norms have a strong positive influence on willingness for the behaviors and habit strength has a negative influence. The other determinants have varying influence depending on type of behavior.

A limitation of this study concerns the focus on only one eco‐innovation. However, since the adoption of AFVs is a high involvement behavior, the results carry implications for other high involvement products as well.

Attitudinal factors and habits in combination prove to be effective determinants for curtailment behaviors and willingness to adopt eco‐innovations. In addition, previous adoption is found to be a strong determinant of future willingness to adopt.

The contribution of the paper is the two‐sided approach on green consumer behavior and the result that values, beliefs and norms not only predict low involvement post‐purchase behaviors but also adoption of high involvement eco‐innovations.

Eco-innovation is a relatively recent construct in the literature, which nowadays more and more researchers and academics consider as one of the strategies that generate a higher level of sustainable and business performance. However, little is known about the influence of eco-innovation practices on sustainable performance and business performance, particularly in the automotive and auto parts industry. Therefore, this paper aims to fill this knowledge gap and explore the aforementioned interdependence.

The influence of eco-innovation practices on sustainable performance and business performance is investigated through a research framework consisting of 5 constructs, 25 items and 6 hypotheses derived from an extensive review of the literature. A self-administered questionnaire was distributed to 460 companies in the automotive and auto parts industry in Mexico. The data were analyzed through a confirmatory factor analysis, descriptive statistics and structural equation modeling.

The results obtained indicated that eco-innovation practices have a positive influence on both sustainable performance and business performance in the automotive and auto parts industry.

This paper provides further insightful evidence of the influence of eco-innovation practices on sustainable performance and business performance, particularly in the automotive and auto parts industry.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse how internal and external factors can influence on the adoption of eco-innovation by food companies. Although innovation and sustainability are relevant concepts, they are not being considered together in the literature. Hereof, eco-innovation encloses both approaches.

A survey with 581 Brazilian companies was conducted. The structure of influential internal and external factors was analysed by an exploratory factor analysis, and the relations between groups of variables identified in the study were verified through regression analysis. Environmental capability, environmental managerial concern and human resources were internal factors investigated in this study, and regulatory and normative pressures, cooperation and government support were the external factors.

Human resources was the most important internal factor, followed by environmental managerial concern and environmental capability. Collaboration was the most important external factor, followed by normative pressures and environmental regulations, while government support was seen as deficient. Companies stated that these factors were important to adopt environmental practices and increase performance.

Understanding why food companies adopt eco-innovation will help policy makers to develop specific actions to promote eco-innovations. For managers, it can be a relevant tool to identify which factors to invest, if the company is eco-strategizing. Hiring committed staff, top management green consciousness and collaboration with key stakeholders can boost sustainability.

This study brings an innovative approach with robust theoretical support in a comprehensive conceptual model, gathering and investigating all relevant internal and external factors in the literature. Those factors are used in an integrated way in the final model for the empirical investigation, while the literature generally emphasizes only external factors.

This paper aims to examine the effect of the characteristics of innovation and change adopters on the rate of adoption of environmental sustainability innovations in hospitals of Bihar state in India.

Data were collected from hospital administration, managers, doctors, nurses and staff working at various levels in both public and private hospitals of Bihar. Research model was tested using regression analysis with the help of statistical package for social sciences 24.

Innovation characteristics of relative advantage, simplicity, trialability and compatibility were found to significantly predict the adoption of eco-innovations while innovativeness and environmental opinion leadership failed to demonstrate any significant impact on sustainability adoption in hospitals.

This study provides important information to the change agents on how to diffuse green innovations in the unsustainable and inefficient areas and make them more sustainable. With no systematic investigation of sustainability innovations being done in the health-care sector in India, this study on eco-innovations in a resource-constrained state of India provides a fresh perspective and practical insights on the state of sustainability innovations in health care.

Although environmental pressures have been covered in great detail in prior literature as the drivers of eco-innovation, there remains inconsistency in the empirical results concerning the effects of these pressures on eco-innovation behaviour. Hence, this paper aims to investigate the impact of environmental pressures, namely, regulatory pressure, green demand and competitive pressure, on eco-innovation among manufacturing SMEs. Moreover, it examined the mediating role of environmental capabilities on the environmental pressure–eco-innovation relationship.

Quantitative data were collected using an online self-reported questionnaire survey to test the hypothesised model. A total of 183 valid questionnaires were collected from managers and owners of manufacturing SMEs in Egypt.

The results of the data analysis using the Smart-PLS software package revealed that among environmental pressures, only green demand had a direct effect on eco-innovation. In addition, environmental capabilities only mediated the effect of competitive pressure on eco-innovation.

This study has been one of the few addressing the issue of how the drivers of eco-innovation interact. It has also provided the managers and owners of SMEs and policymakers with practical implications.

Firms need to develop absorptive capacities to effectively source and exploit knowledge relevant to environmental behaviour for their own innovation activity. Business-to-business interactions can represent a significant route through which knowledge and resources about environmental innovations are transferred along the supply chain. The purpose of this paper is to explore how firms exploit business partnerships in order to build capacity for environmental innovation. In order to do so, it investigates two elements of B2B interactions – partner alignment and compatibility – and their influence on absorptive capacity-building.

This paper is based on a qualitative interview study of knowledge intensive business services (KIBS) operating in the environmental goods and services sector and their clients involved in adopting environmental innovations. Matched pairs of engineering consulting firms and their clients – tourism accommodation establishments – were selected as a sampling frame in order to study the influence of partner alignment and compatibility on the exchange of environmentally relevant knowledge and competencies.

The findings show that the synergistic attributes of business partners influence absorptive capacity-building and give rise to different patterns of interaction of KIBS with their client. The B2B interactions investigated are characterised by alignment along multiple objectives about the relevance of environmental behaviour. Furthermore, the compatibility of the partners’ competences is a key determinant of environmental innovation outcome.

The study highlights the role of managers in identifying and selecting those business partnerships that accrue greater potential benefit for accessing resources and competencies for eco-innovation.

The study contributes to the literature on absorptive capacity and innovation by demonstrating how B2B interactions – in this study, the interaction of KIBS with their clients – influence the capacity of firms to adopt environmental innovations which is an area of study that deserves further attention.

This study aims to investigate the drivers of three main eco-innovation types within the manufacturing small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Egypt, as well as to examine the impact of these types in sustaining competitive advantage.

The positivist methodological paradigm is adopted in this study, with 183 valid questionnaires collected from the owners and executives of manufacturing SMEs. The SmartPLS has been used to analyse the data.

Results show that internal drivers (organisational capabilities, absorptive capacity and strategically environmental orientation) affect eco-innovation types. External drivers (regulation, eco-friendly products demand and competitive advantage) do not significantly affect eco-innovation types. The results also reveal that both eco-organisational and eco-process innovations significantly affect sustainable competitive advantage.

This study has presented valuable insights for owners and executives of SMEs and policymakers in the business and manufacturing industry.

This study has presented valuable insights for literature on eco-innovation, owners and executives of SMEs and policymakers manufacturing industry to depth-understanding of drivers of eco-innovation types. in addition, the role of eco-innovation types in sustaining competitive advantage for SMEs has been a significant contribution to eco-innovation literature.

This study intends to contribute to the literature of eco-innovation by examining the pro-environmental intentions and behaviour among consumers through their understanding of eco-innovation. Thus, the relationship among eco-innovation, general pro-social attitude, generativity, environmental concern, purchasing intentions and buying environmentally friendly products and the differences of the relationship between high and low emotional loyalty and Generation Y and Z were investigated via structural equation modelling (SEM).

Data were collected through an online questionnaire directed to Indian consumers, and analysis was done through partial least square structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) in two stages, i.e. measurement model and structural model.

Results confirm the relationships established in the proposed model, and some differences were found between the levels of emotional loyalty and the Generations Y and Z. The research shows that individualistic norms and perceived marketplace influence play a purposeful role in transforming environmental concerns into buying behaviour towards eco-innovation-driven products.

From a policy and management perspective, the results not only imply the importance of continuous performance and environmental improvement but also those policies hindering diffusion and adoption need to be addressed. Green buying is an elusive task but can be opportunely attained by marketers by adding elements of eco-innovations and understanding mindsets of consumers to create win–win situations for themselves and consumers.

The results reinforced that emotional loyalty and Generations Y and Z vitally impact consumers' green buying decision within the framework of eco-innovation and cognitive factors.

Eco-innovation has been identified as a source of gaining a competitive advantage on a global scale. To build upon that, this study aims to deepen the understanding of eco-innovation in the context of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and investigates the impact of having a clear eco-innovation strategy on a company's sustainability and performance.

A sample of 249 SMEs located in Portugal and the UK participated and structural equation modelling (SEM) was applied to explore the relationship among the constructs.

The findings reveal that both internal and external factors influence the design of an eco-innovation strategy. However, the relevance of external factors seemed to be more significant for Portuguese SMEs. This study concludes that product/process eco-innovations and green innovation systems are determinants for sustainable performance in SMEs. In contrast, the environmental technologies and organisational eco-innovation dimensions are not determinants. This is observed both in Portuguese and UK SMEs.

Most studies in the field tend to explore the role of eco-innovation in large organisations. This study takes a different approach by exploring its impacts on the sustainable business performance of SMEs. Furthermore, it combines data from two countries, which constitutes a strength and gives the opportunity to explore this phenomenon empirically.