Canadian oil sands: How innovation and advanced technologies can support sustainable development

Abstract

An increase in greenhouse gas emissions, coupled with elevated environmental awareness, has triggered the necessity of focusing on effective management of the Canadian oil sands. From Kyoto to Copenhagen, Canada's industry practices have been criticized. The deployment of sustainable production technologies is crucial for the survival of Canada's oil sands industry. Current literature is dominated by science and engineering scholars, yet a major problem appears to be a lack of full understanding of the multiple dimensions of the oil sands projects and the many players involved in innovation of sustainable technologies. A focused attempt to understand the development and commercialization process, with a view towards developing guidelines for individuals and institutions in managing innovation, would therefore be a useful contribution to the oil sands literature. This article proposes such an approach. The framework developed in this article is applied to a case study, with specific attention paid to identifying facilitating and inhibiting factors.

Institutionalizing Ethical Innovation in Organizations: An Integrated Causal Model of Moral Innovation Decision Processes

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“…Innovation is extremely important for organizational effectiveness (Janssen, Van De Vliert, and West, 2004). For technologically driven innovation, these processes involve both structural factors and systems functions (Bloomer, Jagoda, and Landry, 2010). The structural factors consist of institutions generated through corporate governance (Suurs et al, 2010).…”

Exploring the relationships between innovation and internationalization of small and medium‐sized enterprises: A nonrecursive structural equation model

“…The use and the appropriation of advanced technologies both accelerate process and product innovations (Amara, Landry, Becheikh, & Ouimet, 2008). Moreover, the use and development of advanced technologies can help SMEs to increase their productivity in order to compete in the international marketplace (Bloomer, Jagoda, & Landry, 2010). With regard to the effect of advanced technology use, the literature presents inconsistent results.…”

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“…A large body of literature has also emerged on various aspects of sustainable technological innovations (Fagerberg and Verspagen, 2009;Markard et al, 2012). Technology and innovation are recognised as key factors of success for the development of society (Frantzeskaki and Loorbach, 2010) and the long-term survival of companies (Berchicci and King, 2007;Bloomer et al, 2010;Hall and Vredenburg, 2003;Margolis and Walsh, 2003;Hart, 1995;Porter and van der Linde, 1995;Shrivastava, 2008).…”

“…Technological innovation can lead to more renewable energy use, conservation of resources, and new pollution control and waste management technologies. Sustainability is inextricably linked to strategic choices for technological innovation (Bloomer et al, 2010;Elliot, 2011;Hart, 2010) and knowing which innovations need to be developed is crucial to help us to understand what is necessary to achieve global sustainability.…”