Determinants of Environmental Innovations in the Swiss and German Food and Beverage Industry

English) Within the food and beverage industry the opinion that often prevails is that there exists a conflict of objectives between competitiveness and environmental protection. Based on this perception, environmental regulations are seen as an additional burden for companies, mainly imposing extra costs on companies. An alternative view (Porter Hypothesis) proposes that environmental regulation can trigger environmental innovation that may partially or more than fully offset the costs of complying with them. The debate on the causal relationship between environmental regulation, environmental innovations and competitiveness has spurred a large amount of research, but the empirical findings have remained inconclusive. This thesis contributes to the ongoing discussion, on the importance of environmental regulations compared to other drivers in promoting environmental innovations and competitiveness. In the first paper, the existing literature on drivers of environmental innovations is identified and the empirical findings are summarized. In the second paper, the determinants of environmental innovation are evaluated, and the importance of environmental regulation compared to market and firm-internal factors in promoting environmental innovations is tested. The focus is only on industry, namely food and beverages. A standardized questionnaire was developed and face-to-face interviews were conducted with 60 company representatives in Switzerland and Germany. The results show that environmental regulation and cost savings are indeed important drivers of environmental innovations, but environmental regulations mainly foster environmental process innovations. In contrast, environmental product innovations are mainly driven by pro-active firm behavior and environmental commitment and are hindered by strict retail requirements and price-sensitive markets. Nevertheless, retailers play an important role in promoting green innovations, especially organic markets. Those companies that are generally more innovative also tend to introduce more environmental organizational innovations. Overall, small niche players are the environmental innovation leaders. The aim of the third paper is to test, whether" . properly designed environmental standards can trigger innovation that may partially or more than fully offset the costs of complying with them" (Porter and van der Linde, 1995c, p.98). We propose to confirm the Porter hypothesis; to demonstrate that environmental regulation is at least as equally important as other triggers (demand, cost savings, management commitment and other) in promoting environmental innovations and competitiveness. New is the analysis of both the influence of environmental triggers on environmental innovations and on competitiveness. The standardized questionnaire, consisting of face-to-face interviews in 60 Swiss and German food and beverage companies was again the basis for the empirical analysis. Each firm representative was asked to select a maximum of five of the most important environmental innovations, the sample consisting of 188 environmental innovations. The results show that the Porter hypothesis can only partially be confirmed, depending on the types of environmental innovations analyzed. Environmental process innovations, mainly triggered by environmental regulations have positive effects on competitiveness in 29% of the cases. In contrast, environmental regulations largely have no effect on environmental product innovations. Instead, environmental product innovations are largely triggered by demand and have very positive impacts on competitiveness, in 75% of the cases. Therefore (regulatory) measures that further help to promote the demand of environmentally friendly products are needed in the future. The fourth paper presents a concept for a market-based tool, which could foster the demand of environmentally friendly products in the future. Presented is a standardized approach for the sustainability labeling of food products. The evaluation of the products is based on the modular life cycle assessment (Jungbluth et aI., 2000), which has been extended to non-