ISR’s ECO_REBUS project exploring eco-innovation: an update

ISR Marie Curie Fellow Maria Rosa De Giacomo is working on ECO_REBUS: Profiting from ECO-innovation: the RolE of BUSiness model, a research project awarded with the prestigious Horizon 2020 Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship of the European Commission.

ECO_REBUS investigates the phases through which eco-innovative products and services are adopted by firms. The project aims also to understand by a cognitive and processual perspective the relationship between eco-innovation and business models at firm level. 

ECO_REBUS project update

In August 2017 Maria Rosa attended the Academy of Management (AOM) Conference, the most important yearly conference on management in the world, held in Atlanta, GA, USA. The conference attracts about 10,000 academic scholars from across the world every year.

ECO_REBUS has been selected by two excellent events organized by the AOM: the ‘Cognition in the Rough’ Workshop and the ‘Content Analysis Professional Development’ Workshop.

In both events Maria Rosa presented the project during interactive roundtable sessions where researchers and professors from different universities in the world provided feedbacks on ECO_REBUS. Moreover, the Conference hosted also a number of paper sessions on closing topics to ECO_REBUS. For this reason, Maria Rosa also attended those sessions to collect some interesting inputs for her research.

The next months of the project will be very intensive in terms of activities to do. There will be a phase of data collection in few selected companies. To this purpose, interviews with persons involved in the decision-making process about eco-innovation projects will be organised. The final objective is to have a closer appreciation of how pivotal decision makers within firms form their expectations on the impact a new eco-innovative project might have on current value creation and value capture activities. 

At the same time, Maria Rosa will do a review of the literature studies on the topic of eco-innovation and business models, with the aim to understand more in detail on which main aspects previous studies have been focused, and to provide some suggestions on future research opportunities.