Although fundamental innovations can make especially important contributions to the environmental soundness of economic progress, they are often impeded by path dependency and lock-in on the part of established technologies. Because the intensity of the latter effect changes in time, it is...

As raw and processed materials constitute a major share of the cost of inputs to industrial production in all developed countries and since the raw material crisis in 2009 revealed the criticality of the raw material supply worldwide, the increasingly efficient use of material resources has...