The conventional, restoration-oriented environmental conservation strategies pursued in the past three decades has done much to improve on environmental protecton goals, yet, as of today, it is being more and more contained by technical and even more so economic limitations. Diffuse emissions paths, embodied throughout a product's life-span, gain in significance as compared to loclized pollters (e.g. industrial complexes). This is where the Integrated Product Policy concept (IPP) applies by aiming at the reduction of detrimnetal environmental impacts of products throughout the life-cycle. A central question of IPP concerns how the development of environmentally friendly products and their acceptance by consumers may be efficiently arranged for. IPP measures have gained much in significance, such that the OECD, the UN-Comission for Sustainable Development as well as the EU-Comission have been coining related initiatives. The aspect investigated by the ZEW project exclusively involved the firm level capacities in development and conceptualisation, as in terms of the environmental optimisation of products firms indubitably play a significant role. Concretely, the project addressed environmental product innovations in its analysis.

The sudy was methodically incepted with case studies as well as a broad-based survey among firms of the manufacturing industry in Germany. The case studies were carried out, among other reasons, to grasp the process character of the innovations initiated through IPP. Moreover, the case studies laid significant groundwork from which the questionnaire for the survey was developed. As a set of hypotheses and the accordingly modelled interaction patterns made up the result of the case studies, these were tied into measurable and verifiable variables for the questionnaire. The survey was intended to provide representative conclusions on IPP. With the survey data obtained, statistically descriptive and further econometric analyses were conducted. The econometric analysis of the determinants of environmental innovations made use of discrete-choice models, i.e. binary logit as well as multinominal logit and probit models.