Incremental and radical eco-innovations: routes for discovery and development

This paper presents the findings of an in-depth case study of a UK aerospace firm. Drawing on the Natural Resource Based View, we categorise the environmental capabilities of pollution prevention and product stewardship as incremental eco-innovations and clean technologies as radical eco-innovations. We select three new technology development projects as embedded units of analysis, each representing one of the NRBV’s environmental capabilities. Using cross case comparisons, we identify barriers and enablers for incremental and radical eco-innovation development. We conclude that when the final product is complex, such as aerospace design, eco-innovations are developed in parallel with new product development teams co-developing knowledge using a process of embeddedness.