Eco-innovation is the development of products and processes that contribute to sustainable development, applying the commercial application of knowledge to elicit direct or indirect ecological improvements. This includes a range of related ideas, from environmentally friendly technological advances to socially acceptable innovative paths towards sustainability. The field of research that seeks to explain how, why, and at what rate new "ecological" ideas and technology spread is called eco-innovation diffusion. thumb|A seat made from waste containing cartons, foams, and PET bottles
Eco-innovation is the development of products and processes that contribute to sustainable development, applying the commercial application of knowledge to elicit direct or indirect ecological improvements. This includes a range of related ideas, from environmentally friendly technological advances to socially acceptable innovative paths towards sustainability. The field of research that seeks to explain how, why, and at what rate new "ecological" ideas and technology spread is called eco-innovation diffusion. thumb|A seat made from waste containing cartons, foams, and PET bottles
==Concept== The idea of eco-innovation is fairly recent. One of the first appearances in the literature was in a 1996 book by Claude Fussler and Peter James. In a subsequent article in 1997, Peter James defined eco-innovation as "new products and processes which provide customer and business value but significantly decrease environmental impacts". Klaus Rennings employs the term eco-innovation to describe three kinds of changes related to sustainable development: technological, social and institutional innovation.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).