AN OPEN APPROACH TO DEVELOP GREEN INNOVATION. A CASE STUDY ANALYSIS.

According to a widespread definition, environmental innovation consists of “new or modified processes, techniques, systems and products to avoid or reduce environmental damage” (Kemp et al., 2001). In contrast to other innovations, environmental innovations may lead to a so-called ‘win-win’ situation characterized by both economic and environmental benefits (Horbach, 2008). According to this “technology push” view, environmental technological change occurs mostly as the result of government policy. The majority of the studies on environmental innovation focus the attention on technologies promoted by public policy and developed in a firms’ conventional R&D department. On the contrary, the literature on the so-called “open innovation” mode is proliferating (Chesbrough, 2003, 2006) and offering interesting insights, but mainly with respect to “standard” technological innovations (Laursen and Salter, 2006; Henkel, 2006) and less to environmental technology innovation. The idea of openness is that a single organization cannot innovate in isolation. It must engage with different types of partners to acquire ideas and resources from the external environment to stay abreast of the competition (Chesbrough 2003; Laursen and Salter 2006; Ghisetti et al, 2015). The open innovation mode for environmental innovation development is also coherent with the new paradigm based on a Quadruple Helix Model where the ‘natural environments of society’ is added to government, industry, academia and civil participants work together to co-create the future and drive structural changes far beyond the scope of what any one organization or person could do alone. Despite the interest on environmental innovations is on the rise, research on this field is still fragmented, especially with the regard to the open innovation mode to develop eco-friendly innovations. This paper aims at filling this gap in the literature, providing a case study analysis of the eco- innovation developed adopting the open innovation paradigm