• Energy Research

Green hydrogen exploitation plays a crucial role in achieving carbon neutrality by 2050. Hydrogen, in fact, provides a number of key benefits for the energy system, due to its integrability with other clean technologies for energy production and consumption. This paper is aimed at presenting the project of recovery of an abandoned industrial area located in central Italy by developing a site for the production of green hydrogen. To this aim, the analysis of the territorial and industrial context of the area allowed us to design the project phases and to define the sizing criteria of the hydrogen production plant. The results of a preliminary cost–benefit analysis show that a huge initial investment is required and that, in the short term, the project is sustainable only with a very large public grant. On the other hand, in the long term, the project is sustainable, and the benefits significantly overcome the costs.

Every company, in a knowledge-based economy and, in a sustainability-aware era, is “doomed” to deal with a critical mass of strategic assets, in order to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage. Maintaining this system up-to-date requires financial/organizational efforts. Therefore, in order to optimize performance, it is necessary to detect which are the assets that can be outsourced/externalized without jeopardizing the business model architecture. Nevertheless, several studies confirm the inherent risks upcoming with any decision of outsourcing; pursuing a bearable long-term advantage over competitors mostly involves combinations of resources and capabilities, i.e., intangible assets. By the means of a multi-criteria indicator, the proposed framework builds a quantitative relational ranking of such resources, disclosing their critical weight (revealing which assets are actually strategic), hence the convenience for each of them to be outsourced or kept “in-house” to create sustainable value. This solution permits a strategy-level prioritization to take informed decisions on outsourcing candidates, also returning further analytics on the status of each investigated entity. Designed as a discriminating tool in make/buy resolutions to be used alongside traditional cost-based criteria, it represents a comprehensive approach capable of appreciating the complexity of the problem and the involved risks in order to keep a sustainable momentum.

Abstract This paper evaluates the effectiveness of a policy mix between general innovation policies and environmental policies in fostering the adoption of global warming-related eco-innovations both in the short term and long term. Focusing on process eco-innovations, we investigate whether the combined impact of general innovation and environmental policy instruments, which we term a cross-instrumental policy mix, is greater than their individual impact. We examined data from the Mannheim Innovation Panel on German firms, investigating both cross-sectional data from 2015 and longitudinal data from two waves of the survey conducted in 2009 and 2015. We apply two models, based respectively on a matching analysis and a panel analysis. We find that cross-instrumental policy mix has a stronger positive effect on process eco-innovations than the impact of general innovation policy instruments alone, both in the short and long term. In contrast, although we expected the greater impact of a cross-instrumental policy mix relative to environmental policy instruments, this argument is not supported by our empirical results. Our study offers policy implications concerning the coordination of innovation and environmental policies in achieving an optimal policy mix.