BTECH research seminar

Abstract: For society to meet environmental challenges it is important that firms adopt sustainable business practices (Kuhlman & Farrington, 2010). This requires eco-innovations at product and process level (Juntunen et al., 2019) in combination with sustainable transitions of socio-technical systems of industrial production (Weigelt et al., 2021). Innovative high-tech firms hold an important role in this process, as their market offerings have implications for the sustainability of their customers’ operations (Paparoidamis et al. 2019). Facilitating eco-innovation in high tech firms is thus key to transforming their customers’ operations and bringing about sustainable transformation of industrial production. In this paper we integrate the literature on eco-innovation and sustainability transitions of socio-technical systems to analyze how small and medium sized high-tech firms experience and respond to the conflicting societal demand for environmental sustainability and customers’ cost focus.