Innovation and performance improvements

The main research questions for this book are: how can we consider the principles of sustainable development for evaluating the performance at firm and sector level?; how can innovation and systems of innovation contribute to improve the performance at firm and sector level in order to introduce the challenges of sustainable development?; what are the main factors facilitating or hindering the innovation processes in Costa Rica?; and what kind of strategies and policies could be used in order to promote performance improvements at sectoral level in the country? Both in the theoretical framework and the empirical analysis, the book present the concept of sustainable performance as a way to study sustainable development at firm and sectoral levels. It is also presented the concept of innovation and sys-tems of innovations. The environmental dimension of innovations is developed presenting the concept of cleaner technologies. There is also a discussion about the role of innovation and systems of innovation as determinants of performance changes. A discussion on the factors facilitating and hindering innovations is also developed.