The Intersection of Digitalization, Innovation, and Information Technology: A New Era of Sustainable Development in EU

Environmental issues have been at the heart of the global and EU member states policy agenda at least for the last decade. Currently, support for innovation is one of the focal areas of environmental sustainability development, with a focus on digitalization and information technology as leading driving forces of the current sixth wave of innovation development. This paper examines whether and how environmental sustainability and the level of innovation development, use of information technologies, and digitalization, in the case of EU Member States, are related. We assume that a tight interconnection between environmental sustainability and innovation exists both in normative and real-life current making. We conducted a literature review of the existing global normative documents from the field of environmental sustainability, and of the already conducted studies and statistical analysis of the data from the European Innovation Scoreboard 2023, conducting the Pearson correlation test and linear regression. Our results indicate a positive correlation between environmental sustainability and digitalization, as well as the use of information technology, but not between innovation and environmental sustainability. The findings provide valuable insights for the reflection on current environmental sustainability and innovation, digitalization policy agenda among EU member states as global advocates of such development as it opens the need to build a bridge between normative words on the paper and everyday real-life attitudes toward environmental sustainability, digitalization, and innovation. More action is required in the sense of putting into action policy and research findings.