No abstract

In an increasingly competitive world driven by fast changes, companies are challenged to pursue sustainable development through innovation. This matter has led to the discussion about how organizations manage innovate in a way that they meet the demands of sustainability. Recently, researchers have identified the integration of management systems (IMS) as a potential practice to support both innovation and sustainability. This research aims to contribute to this field by exploring the relationship between IMS and sustainable innovation. Although substantial research has analyzed sustainable innovations in developed countries, there is still scarce empirical evidence including also less developed countries. This exploratory research addresses this current limitation by including European and Latin-American companies. Results suggest that IMS provides the managerial support to foster the adoption of cleaner production technologies. The latter is of particular relevance towards the development of sustainable products that deal with the technical, environmental and social impacts of new products. However, the role of IMS towards sustainable product innovation is not significant. Moreover, no significant differences are found in the development of sustainable innovations among candle manufacturers in Europe and Latin-America. Bigger companies are found more innovative in terms of the adoption of cleaner production technologies, but no significant differences are observed in terms of sustainable product innovation. Besides these findings, this study also contributes to the state-of-the-art by proposing a proxy measure of IMS not restricted to certified organizations. All in all, this is one of the first articles to relate IMS, the adoption of cleaner production technologies and sustainable product innovation studying a sample of companies allocated in countries of diverse economic backgrounds.

Findings: The level of IMS positively influences process and product IC. Moreover, external cooperation, and using it a high extent not only positively moderate the effects of the level of IMS over process IC, but also of process over product IC, where it becomes indispensable for its effect to be positive. Finally, investing in external knowledge is a positive moderator of the effects of the level of IMS over both: process and product IC.Originality / Value: This is one the first studies on empirically finding evidence of the impact of the level of IMS on process and product IC, and of the moderating effect of performing OI activities in order to achieve higher process and product IC through the IMS.

In an increasingly competitive world, firms are continuously challenged to benefit different stakeholders through an efficient innovation process using limited resources. To this end, the Integration of Management Systems (IMS) and Open Innovation (OI) are two managerial practices analyzed in this study as potential drivers of innovation efficiency. The longitudinal analyses of 220 Spanish firms suggest that IMS enables innovation efficiency, whilst OI might deliver some manageable inefficiency. Moreover, innovation efficiency has a positive impact on the sales productivity of new products. This is one of the first articles to study jointly these managerial practices in pursuit of innovation benefits.