Brujin, Theo and Peter Hofman, “The Emergence of Sustainable Innovations: Key Factors and Regional Support Structures,” in Facilitating Sustainable Innovation through Collaboration (Springer Netherlands, 2010), 115-33.
While technology plays an important role in most innovations, in most cases collaboration and managing information are just as important. In the case of sustainable innovations this is even more important as sustainable development requires radical innovations next to more incremental changes. This is because fundamental changes in production and consumption systems are required to meet the needs of an ever-growing population while using resources in a sustainable manner. Big business has the resources to make drastic changes to processes because they have the staffing or money to hire someone to do so. SME’s are too busy focusing on the bottom line to spend money on these issues, so the author finds that Regional Support Structures are crucial to the implementation of sustainable practices in the long term. If these small businesses could look to local and state governments for assistance in keeping them up to speed with innovations and regulations, as well as possibly linking them to funding for implementation of sustainable practices, SME’s could have a major impact on the world around us.
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