Environmental initiatives, innovativeness and competitiveness: some empirical evidence

This paper focuses on effective pollution prevention, which requires the ability to decrease adverse environmental impacts at every stage of the life cycle of a given product. Since stronger environmental performance will increasingly constitute an asset, even an a priori requirement for selling products in international markets or qualifying as a supplier, firms will have to move faster along the product greening path. Further, firms that take full responsibility for the environmental impacts of their products from cradle to grave experience high levels of organizational learning. Based on empirical results from a survey of 368 environmentally responsible manufacturing firms, the paper investigates the impact of the environmental initiatives taken by those firms on their innovativeness and competitiveness.