What Prevents Businesses from Carrying out Eco-Innovation Activities? Empirical Research on Barriers in Slovak SMEs

Abstract

Eco-innovations seem to be an effective tool of the transformation process towards sustainability where enterprises must play an active role. As small and medium-sized enterprise (SMEs) are one of the key accelerators of this transition, particular attention should be paid to the main factors that influence eco-innovation activities in this business segment. The paper focuses on the identification and assessment of barriers that limit the more intensive development of eco-innovation activities in Slovak SMEs. It analyses empirical data on barriers to eco-innovations and explores possible relationships between perceived barriers to eco-innovation, size of enterprise, the share of foreign capital in the enterprise's financing and involvement in eco-innovation activities. The research sample contains 487 randomly selected Slovak SMEs. The article presents the results of the examination of the barriers importance in eco-innovation activities in Slovak SMEs assessed by Likert scale values, descriptive statistics, and selected statistical methods including the Shapiro-Wilk test, Spearman correlation, Friedman test and Wilcoxon signed rank tests. The conclusions provide some deeper insights into the perception of barriers to eco-innovation in Slovak SMEs according to their size, share of foreign capital in financing and implementation or non-implementation of eco-innovation, with some results showing similarities with other studies conducted abroad, while others are specific only to Slovak SMEs.