Influential Article Review - Evaluation of the Impact of Eco-innovation by Means of Sustainability Indicators

Abstract

This paper examines sustainability. We present insights from a highly influential paper. Here are the highlights from this paper: Innovative processes aimed at sustainable development or eco-innovations have received increasing attention during the past years despite the lack of theoretical and methodological approaches to analyzing their impact. This paper focuses on how sustainability indicators can be used to measure the effects of “non-technical” eco-innovations in the Sri Lankan tea plantation sector. After carrying out an experimental case study on a commercial tea plantation, we employed a combination of physical and monetary sustainability indicators to evaluate the initial results of the eco-innovation. It shows that innovations aimed at improving economic benefits often result in unintentional environmental and social benefits that support a lean-green relationship. It reveals the difficulty in having a standardized set of indicators to measure the impact of eco-innovations owing to the multidimensionality of sustainability. Hence, the case study suggests adopting broad sustainability indicators that represent the wholeness of the system while capturing the long-term impact. For our overseas readers, we then present the insights from this paper in Spanish, French, Portuguese, and German.