GrICRiS

In recent years, environmental concerns have encouraged firms to specialize on the production of environmentally-friendly products and services, via the so-called green innovation (or eco-innovation). The purpose of green innovation is to generate durable products and services with low impact on the environment. For green innovation to take place, a creative process efficiently transforming scarce resources in environmentally-friendly products is needed. The aim of the project is to propose new ways of incorporating behavioral arguments in the creativity-innovation channel related to green products and services. In particular, our project has been thought so as to shed light on the following research questions: 1) Do different forms of creativity contribute differently to green vs. traditional innovation? 2) Does creative agents’ risk aversion support or inhibit green innovation? 3) Are some organizational and social contexts more inclined to green-type innovation processes? The main methodological contribution of the project is the design of appropriate experiments in order to assess and compare creativity leading to green innovation, following the three above mentioned research questions. Furthermore, we use insights from our experimental results to enrich existing models of green innovation and creativity through (new) behavioral arguments. In particular, we focus on cognitive (risk aversion), psychological (intrinsic motivation) and sociological (social context and organizational modes) arguments. This should shed light on the role played by creativity on green innovation, and on the role of different socio-cultural and institutional contexts on pro-green creativity, by comparing the French situation to other European contexts. Indeed, conducting laboratory and field experiments across three EU countries (France, Italy and Spain) with both economic students (control group) and creative entrepreneurs should allow us to account both for geographical/institutional differences and for creative paths having a prominent impact for eco-innovation.