Shaping sustainable technology development in the coatings chain Defining boundaries, environmental problems and main players

To meet the requirements of sustainable technology development, innovation processes should go beyond optimization, retroffitting and redesign based on incremental innovation, to focus particularly on breakthrough innovations. The aim of current research looks forward to building insights in the field of environment, technology and innovation to design and test a methodology for medium-, long-term innovation planning of future technological options towards sustainability in the paint and coatings chain, and to draw conclusions under which conditions this methodology is feasible. This paper describes the conceptual and theoretical framework as well as the integrated chain, the main environmental problems and the main actors in the network under research.