The relationship between selective environments and adoption of eco-innovations in the automotive sector

Abstract:

The main question that this paper aims to answer is how different selective environments could determine the adoption of some of these new alternative technologies in the automotive sector. We define selective environment as a set of specific technological, socio-economic and institutional configurations restricted to some geographical space. The methodology consists on qualitative, study-case analyzes. The first step is to identify some successful cases of generation and diffusion of eco-innovations on automotive sector in both developed and developing countries. After, we characterize the selective environment where each of such eco-innovations were successfully adopted, taking into account their social-economic (demand preferences and habits, prices), institutional (firms behaviors, regulations, policies, physical infra-structure) and technological (knowledge bases, technological capabilities, educational systems, development of complementary technologies) features. From this point, we discuss how the characteristics of each selective environment shaped the characteristics of its respective eco-innovation. Finally, we discuss the specific case of developing countries. The work uses literature review and sectoral reports as main data sources.