A taxonomy of green innovators: Empirical evidence from South Korea

This paper presents a new taxonomy of green innovators. Using firm-level data from the Korea Innovation Survey, this paper investigates different types of eco-innovations, how these relate to each other, and what their main determinants are. The empirical methodology builds on a combination of factor, cluster, and multinomial logit analysis. The taxonomy identifies four groups of green innovators: (1) carbon dioxide reducing; (2) waste-reducing; (3) recycling innovators; (4) and pollution-reducing. Research and development (R&D) policies emerge as relevant factors for enhancing innovation in waste-reducing firms, whereas environmental taxes and regulations are found to be more important drivers of technological change for pollution-reducing firms. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, it points out the firm-specific characteristics and policy instruments that are more relevant for different types of green innovation. Second, it provides new firm-level evidence for South Korea, thus expanding the geographical scope of econometric research on green innovation, which has so far largely focused only on European countries. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.