sustainability Article Teleworking as an Eco-Innovation for Sustainable Development: Assessing Collective Perceptions during COVID-19 Francesca Loia 1, * and Paola Adinolfi 2   Citation: Loia, F.; Adinolfi, P. Teleworking as an Eco-Innovation for Sustainable Development: Assessing Collective Perceptions during COVID-19. Sustainability 2021, 13, 4823. https://doi.org/ 10.3390/su13094823 Academic Editors: Antonio J. Verdu-Jover and Lirios Alos-Simo Received: 10 March 2021 Accepted: 22 April 2021 Published: 25 April 2021 Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affil- iations. Copyright: © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). 1 Department of Economics, Management and Institutions, Federico II University of Naples, 80126 Naples, Italy 2 Department of Management & Innovation Systems, University of Salerno, 84084 Fisciano, Italy; padinolfi@unisa.it * Correspondence: francesca.loia@unina.it Abstract: Due to the spread of COVID-19, new challenges and opportunities for business innovation have emerged, including the way work is organized and designed. In particular, pandemic created the conditions for the most extensive mass teleworking experiment in history. While there is a wide literature on the effects of teleworking as a business innovation, mainly from an environmental perspective, there are few studies investigating the public perceptions regarding teleworking and, in particular, studies that draw from social media analyses. Based on these considerations, a big data analysis has been carried out in order to frame the public perceptions about teleworking on Twitter. The six-months sentiment analysis of about 11,000 tweets shows that the ecological value of telework is not perceived by people; surprisingly, in a pandemic context of growing ecological concern, there is no significant evidence of environmental awareness in relation to teleworking. However, the positive and negative concepts which emerge in relation to teleworking and similar terms can be assimilated to the benefits and pitfalls highlighted in the literature, which are related to economic or social sustainability. This has important implications for practice in organizations employing teleworking, which are highlighted in the conclusion, together with the limitations and future research avenues. Keywords: teleworking; sustainable development; eco-innovation; COVID-19; sentiment analysis 1. Introduction Due to the spread of COVID-19, new challenges and opportunities for business innovation have emerged, including the way work is organized and designed. While in the last ten years telework increased slowly because considered as an occasional work pattern, during the pandemic, both organizations that were previously familiar with teleworking, and organizations that have not experimented with teleworking before, were sending their employees home, creating the conditions for the most extensive mass teleworking experiment in history. It is widely accepted that well-designed telework arrangements can support develop- ment policies aimed at shifting from automobile dependency to sustainable travel and at reducing electricity in the workplace [1–3]. This means that teleworking has some potential to reduce energy consumption and associated emissions both in terms of reducing com- muter travel and displacing office-related energy consumption. In light of this, teleworking could be included among eco-innovations, defined as “innovations that consist of new or modified processes, practices, systems and products which benefit the environment and so contribute to environmental sustainability” [4]. As efficaciously observed by Alos-Simo, Verdu-Jover and Gomez-Gras [5] (p. 3), eco- innovations can be considered as “‘win-win’ strategy, that benefits both the business and the environment” [6], “a key tool for the organization’s long-term survival” [7], “an important key to growth [8] that improves the firm’s reputation and market position” [9]. There is a wide literature that illustrates the effects of teleworking on the business and the environment, as well as on the organizations’ survival and growth. There are indeed Sustainability 2021, 13, 4823. https://doi.org/10.3390/su13094823 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability