Abstract

Despite being the underpinning of economic development, entrepreneurs encounter numerous obstacles and limitations while trying to innovate, especially when it comes to eco-innovations. Eco-innovations have been acknowledged in the European Union (EU) as a significant factor in sustainable and environmentally friendly development. Even though there has been an increase in eco-innovation research, it is still unclear what motivates entrepreneurs in the informal sector to innovate in this way. This research assesses a set of eco-innovation principles created around the idea within informal economic enterprises by using a triple conceptual grounding approach. Researchers suggest that an entrepreneur's sense of place at home influences their success in terms of eco-innovation. The research has two objectives: 1) To identify the primary obstacles to the advancement of eco-innovations, and 2) To assess how well the principal obstacles are progressing among EU nations. In addition, researchers investigate how internal and external environmental variables influence management discretion (i.e., institutional ownership and market complexity). Researchers suggest that market complexity acts as a positive moderator while ownership concentration acts as a negative moderator of the positive association between entrepreneurs' community identification and eco-innovation. The results confirm these hypotheses employing openly traded corporations from 2002 to 2016 in environmentally damaging areas. This study contributes to the existing literature on the social responsibility of companies and upper-echelon theory and has significant practical complications.

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