Résumé
In the Languedoc-Roussillon region, an action has been implemented in 2005 to identify the behaviours of the firms (about 50 firms) of the agro-food sector toward sustainable development. The main result of this collective action is a guide of best practices for a sustainable development in agro-food sector. This guide can be completed by the enterprises and can also be used by others in order to take some good ideas for the enterprises. In this study, many SME consider that their small form is coherent with the concept of sustainable development because they are embedded in their local environment. Some of them say that they have been working in a sustainable way since always without realizing. So, the question of interest is to know if agro-food firms use this guide to innovate in a sustainable development perspective, and which innovation they implemented. We will focus on the enterprises characteristics, the kind of innovation decided and the consequences on the enterprises organisation. Our investigation aims also to analyse on the relevance of this collective action, and the role of institutional environment in promotion and dissemination of sustainable good practices in SME in agro-food sector. For this purpose, we first analyse the concepts of sustainable development, on the one hand, in a managerial point of view, for SME, and of innovation, on the second hand, to identify which kind of innovations can be implemented in this respect. We will than analyse and evaluate the guide of good practices available for enterprises in order to identify the feasibility of different practices.