Lighting transition : overcoming barriers to eco-innovation in the LED sector

International audienceThis paper analyses the barriers to the ecological transition of lighting, notably the ones faced by European firms, notably SMEs, when trying to produce ecodesigned LED systems that can substantially reduce the ecological impacts of lighting. The multilevel perspective (MLP) is used to analyse these barriers and their interactions, as well as to suggest strategies and policies to overcome them. The ecological impacts of lighting technologies concern pollutions, the exhaustion of resources, and global environmental changes, and occur at each phase of the lifecycle. (...) New lighting solutions such as ecodesigned LED can contribute to overcome these ecological challenges by reducing the use of energy a nd other raw materials as well as lighting wastes. They can also help overcome societal challenges by creating jobs in a cleaner economic sector and by reducing the lighting gap, as evidenced by the diffusion of LED systems fuelled by renewables in develop ing countries (Adkins et al. (2010), Harish et al. (2013)). As Hall et al. (2014: 5) underline, "approximately two billion people currently do not have access to electricity and have to rely on candles and kerosene - based lighting, a dangerous, unhealthy, e xpensive and poor quality alternative". Besides providing strategy and policy recommendations to European LED firms and policy makers, from an academic perspective this study is the first of its kind to study barriers to ec o - innovation in the LED sector . This paper also brings out specific features of the LED sector by contrasting it with other sectors for which barriers to eco - innovation have been analysed. Finally, it also 50 constitutes a first attempt to construct solutions to overcome barriers to eco - in novation by using the multilevel perspective