The Role of Innovation and Technology in Industrial Ecology Systems for the Sustainable Development of Emerging Regions

Abstract

The excessive growth of industrialization and the enormous movement of economic and physical goods and resources by industrialized countries have created a social imbalance in the poorest regions and a tremendous impact on their environment and on the exhaustion of their natural resources. This situation converges into a dilemma that raises the question: “how to insert technology into the innovation chains to remedy, recycle, reuse and/or redesign industrial processes?” This study proposes a framework for harmoniously articulating the three large sub-systems (the economic, the social, and the environmental) of the natural ecosystem through a systemic model of industrial ecology supported by innovation systems and enabling technologies, capable of maintaining a synergy among all the constituents of the three subsystems, with the intention to arrive at a sustainable holistic development of the regions, mainly for developing countries.