Design and eco-innovation: micro-evidence from the Eurobarometer survey

This paper investigates the role of design in making firms eco-innovate. Going beyond the ‘packed’ approach of environmental studies about ‘eco-design’, we maintain that the eco-innovative impact of design is correlated with the firm’s decision to invest in it. In turn, design investment is assumed connected with the use firms make of design. By pooling the Eurobarometer 2015 and 2016 surveys, we test for these arguments with respect to a sample of nearly 4500 European and non-European (US and Switzerland) manufacturing firms. Results confirm that the firms’ capacity of eco-innovating increases when they invest in design, also by making this investment dependent on the role of design within the firm. The relationship between eco-innovation and design appears robust with respect to the different kinds of ‘eco-innovators’ that the Eurobarometer enables us to consider, while some interesting variability emerges when splitting the sample by group of countries and industries.