I am an eco-innovation researcher with a background in economics and an interest in policy, history, societal change, theory and research methodology. I have written a book on environmental policy and technical change and studied innovation diffusion and eco-innovation measurement in renewable energy, automobility, waste and the circular economy. The last few years I have studied social innovation and urban lab projects. As a professor of innovation and sustainable development I try to do socially relevant research and offer policy advice to create a better world. My experiences with policy dialogue and knowledge of the sociology of knowledge helped me to appreciate the ways in which facts and values are intertwined. I am a stern believer in interdisciplinary research for seeing the ‘whole elephant’.
This article identifies and analyzes factors that affect the willingness of firms and consumers t... more This article identifies and analyzes factors that affect the willingness of firms and consumers to develop and adopt cleaner technologies.Cleaner technologies is used as a general term for pollution abatement technologies, re-use systems, and environmentally sound ...
Consilience: journal of sustainable development, 2009
The paper tries to explore the rationale behind the complexities of energy poverty among differen... more The paper tries to explore the rationale behind the complexities of energy poverty among different income groups in rural communities. We attempted to understand why rural rich, despite their relatively high purchasing power use energy sources which tend to categorize them as energy poor. Using Energy Poverty Survey (EPS), a dataset of more than 600 rural households from 27 different rural communities of Punjab, Pakistan, we presented energy access situation in rural households among different income groups. Subsequently, we used logit to assess access factors which could impact the energy source choices among different income groups. The insignificance of household income for traditional biomass use and high significance of community remoteness indicators imply that households give high importance on the proximity of energy sources available to them and, in many cases, will prefer to be in the state of energy poor, than to use modern energy source like LPG.
The article looks into eco-innovation as a concept that supersedes the older concept of environme... more The article looks into eco-innovation as a concept that supersedes the older concept of environmental technology. The analytical basis of eco-innovation is under construction, there is no commonly agreed definition. For most people eco-innovation is another term for innovation for the environment, and includes environmental-beneficial innovations who are not environmentally motivated. The article offers a typology of eco-innovation developed in a project for the European Commission, examines indicators for measurement and offers suggestions for measurement. Push and pull mechanisms for different types of eco-innovations are discussed, before turning to a discussion on patterns in eco-innovation. The article presents data that illustrates the shift towards cleaner products and continuing importance of end-of-pipe solutions, and discusses national differences in eco-innovation use, lead market issues, and the growing attention to system innovation. A conclusion of the article is that ...
Successful political strategies for enhancing sustainability require the acknowledgement of chan... more Successful political strategies for enhancing sustainability require the acknowledgement of changing intra-system dynamics, including the possibility of inertia, of the ecological, cultural, techno-economic as well as political systems. Provided that ecosystem dynamics and time scales allow for a long-term oriented strategy, as it is the case for e.g. climate change, policy should build on, and exploit, these differences in evolutionary dynamics in order to allow for a boundary-bridging, self-enforcing co-evolution of these systems. Fundamental innovations which are considered particularly effective in achieving an increase in ecological sustainability often face a particular barrier to market entry known as ‘lock-out’ or, from the perspective of the established technology, ‘lock-in’. While the usual explanations of the latter phenomenon refer to increasing returns to adoption, we could identify a variety of potential additional causes in the techno-economic, but also in the socio-...
The Dynamics of Environmental and Economic Systems, 2012
This chapter examines the link between environmental performance, corporate social performance an... more This chapter examines the link between environmental performance, corporate social performance and innovativeness for consumer and industrial firms, using company data on R&D, environmental and corporate social performance from the Kinder, Lydenberg and Domini (KLD) database for US-based firms. We find empirically that during the period from 1999 to 2008, there has been an increase in environmental action, especially since 2004. A positive correlation is found to exist between environmental and non-environmental social performance in many dimensions and a positive but weak link between environmental performance and R&D per employee or unit of sales. This chapter shows that there is a difference between consumer and industrial firms in terms of the evolution of eco-activities and environmental impact. Contrary to what we expected, industrial firms undertook more product-related eco-activities than consumer firms. Industrial firms also showed a greater increase in process-related eco-activity. The increase in eco-activity went with an increase in eco-impact in both company types, suggesting that environmental action did not arrest environmental degradation overall.
... René Kemp 1 and Stefan Zundel 2 1 United Nations University, Maastricht Economic and social R... more ... René Kemp 1 and Stefan Zundel 2 1 United Nations University, Maastricht Economic and social Research and training centre on Innovation and Technology (UNU-MERIT), Keizer Karelplein 19, NL-6211 TC Maastricht. ... Page 2. 26 René Kemp and Stefan Zundel ...
This article identifies and analyzes factors that affect the willingness of firms and consumers t... more This article identifies and analyzes factors that affect the willingness of firms and consumers to develop and adopt cleaner technologies.Cleaner technologies is used as a general term for pollution abatement technologies, re-use systems, and environmentally sound ...
Consilience: journal of sustainable development, 2009
The paper tries to explore the rationale behind the complexities of energy poverty among differen... more The paper tries to explore the rationale behind the complexities of energy poverty among different income groups in rural communities. We attempted to understand why rural rich, despite their relatively high purchasing power use energy sources which tend to categorize them as energy poor. Using Energy Poverty Survey (EPS), a dataset of more than 600 rural households from 27 different rural communities of Punjab, Pakistan, we presented energy access situation in rural households among different income groups. Subsequently, we used logit to assess access factors which could impact the energy source choices among different income groups. The insignificance of household income for traditional biomass use and high significance of community remoteness indicators imply that households give high importance on the proximity of energy sources available to them and, in many cases, will prefer to be in the state of energy poor, than to use modern energy source like LPG.
The article looks into eco-innovation as a concept that supersedes the older concept of environme... more The article looks into eco-innovation as a concept that supersedes the older concept of environmental technology. The analytical basis of eco-innovation is under construction, there is no commonly agreed definition. For most people eco-innovation is another term for innovation for the environment, and includes environmental-beneficial innovations who are not environmentally motivated. The article offers a typology of eco-innovation developed in a project for the European Commission, examines indicators for measurement and offers suggestions for measurement. Push and pull mechanisms for different types of eco-innovations are discussed, before turning to a discussion on patterns in eco-innovation. The article presents data that illustrates the shift towards cleaner products and continuing importance of end-of-pipe solutions, and discusses national differences in eco-innovation use, lead market issues, and the growing attention to system innovation. A conclusion of the article is that ...
Successful political strategies for enhancing sustainability require the acknowledgement of chan... more Successful political strategies for enhancing sustainability require the acknowledgement of changing intra-system dynamics, including the possibility of inertia, of the ecological, cultural, techno-economic as well as political systems. Provided that ecosystem dynamics and time scales allow for a long-term oriented strategy, as it is the case for e.g. climate change, policy should build on, and exploit, these differences in evolutionary dynamics in order to allow for a boundary-bridging, self-enforcing co-evolution of these systems. Fundamental innovations which are considered particularly effective in achieving an increase in ecological sustainability often face a particular barrier to market entry known as ‘lock-out’ or, from the perspective of the established technology, ‘lock-in’. While the usual explanations of the latter phenomenon refer to increasing returns to adoption, we could identify a variety of potential additional causes in the techno-economic, but also in the socio-...
The Dynamics of Environmental and Economic Systems, 2012
This chapter examines the link between environmental performance, corporate social performance an... more This chapter examines the link between environmental performance, corporate social performance and innovativeness for consumer and industrial firms, using company data on R&D, environmental and corporate social performance from the Kinder, Lydenberg and Domini (KLD) database for US-based firms. We find empirically that during the period from 1999 to 2008, there has been an increase in environmental action, especially since 2004. A positive correlation is found to exist between environmental and non-environmental social performance in many dimensions and a positive but weak link between environmental performance and R&D per employee or unit of sales. This chapter shows that there is a difference between consumer and industrial firms in terms of the evolution of eco-activities and environmental impact. Contrary to what we expected, industrial firms undertook more product-related eco-activities than consumer firms. Industrial firms also showed a greater increase in process-related eco-activity. The increase in eco-activity went with an increase in eco-impact in both company types, suggesting that environmental action did not arrest environmental degradation overall.
... René Kemp 1 and Stefan Zundel 2 1 United Nations University, Maastricht Economic and social R... more ... René Kemp 1 and Stefan Zundel 2 1 United Nations University, Maastricht Economic and social Research and training centre on Innovation and Technology (UNU-MERIT), Keizer Karelplein 19, NL-6211 TC Maastricht. ... Page 2. 26 René Kemp and Stefan Zundel ...
Uploads