R&D and eco-innovation: opportunities for closer collaboration between universities and companies through technology centers

Abstract

It is widely accepted that eco-innovation is the direction to make progress towards a sustainable innovation. Public and private actors seem to share a common point of view and agreement on the benefits of implementing eco-innovation. If this is the case, why eco-innovative activities are still exceptional and exemplary instead of being the usual reasoning and inspiring driver for all kind of actions? Going in depth into the reasons why eco-innovation techniques are not broadly spread, the main one is the lack of internalization of this attitude in all the everyday actions taken by companies and employees in the form of social responsibility. Definitively, society as a whole is responsible for the eco-innovation promotion. Large companies have long ago incorporated Social Responsibility into their strategic planning and invest on innovation as a competitive advantage. However, they are reluctant to contribute to the eco-innovation. Therefore, universities and technology centers (TCs) have to play this role and link the private sector, specially medium, and small size companies, with the society needs. However, Universities are not often leading the eco-innovation initiative. Currently, in the case of Spain, it is observed a huge gap between the scientific research efforts made by the Public University and the academic offering and the real needs of the private companies. In fact, mixed structures as TCs are needed in order to overcome this disconnection, increasing opportunities for subsequent cooperation in eco-innovation projects. This paper points out the causes of the Spanish R&D and innovation lag, and highlights the reasons of the disconnection between public and private research for innovation, while giving hints on what is working fine and what needs to be reviewed to catch up with the R&D reference countries in Europe.