Green IT for innovation and innovation for green IT: The virtuous circle

Abstract

Green IT has recently appeared as a mandatory approach to take into account energy efficiency in information technology. This article investigates the Green IT area and its opportunities for innovation. This chapter analyses the main motivations for Green IT, and proposes a definition of Green IT including social, environmental and economic concerns. Beyond simply listing areas of possible innovation, this paper studies the virtuous circle that appears in Green IT: while Green IT has its own motivations, the resulting research feeds into other research fields. Innovation in this particular sector paves the way for further innovation by means of original research not foreseen initially. © 2012 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.