Fostering eco-innovation in SMEs through bridging research, education and industry for building a business oriented model

Small and medium sized companies (SMEs) assure economic growth in Europe. The Environmental Technologies Action Plan (ETAP) concentrated and mobilized Member State and stakeholder efforts bringing eco-innovation from research to market, improving market conditions, opening up global markets. Rapid and reinforced actions are now required, building on the experience of ETAP helping SMEs to have benefits by introducing eco-innovative approaches into their operations. Particularly start-ups, can be the ideal incubators for eco-innovation, and can bring to market new, less environmentally damaging products, services and processes. Generally many SMEs are struggling to survive in an ongoing global recession and often they are becoming reluctant to release innovation, particularly eco-innovation (Assante et al., 2016). In this paper we present first the differences between eco-innovation based business models and those based on regular innovations. Secondly we give some approaches tested in national and European projects with participation of the authors in order to help SMEs to develop business models of eco-innovations. The first one is to build cooperation between researchers, educators and SME staff in order to explain SMEs the advantages of such models and to implement models designed by researchers. Secondly we used practice oriented forms of training for SMEs like Problem Based Learning (PBL) as an efficient form for SMEs and entrepreneurship education to learn to solve problems like the building of an eco-innovation business model. Thirdly we use in our projects eco-innovation biographies (EIBs) reflecting the evolutionary character of such innovations and the dynamics of related policy streams.