Digital technologies are a valuable strategy for finding, identifying, combining and integrating external knowledge, as well as for generating new organizational forms to develop innovative solutions. At the same time, digital technologies are allowing a more active collaboration and interaction among companies, communities of experts, and consumers in order to address environmental-oriented innovation challenges. Environmental innovation refers to the development of new or improved products and the creation of new processes and business models that bring benefits to the natural environment. In that sense, the main objective of this study is to discuss, from a conceptual perspective, how digital technologies promote open collaboration processes to achieve environmental innovations.We analyze crowdsourcing, customer co-development, and R&D alliances as mechanisms to achieve Sustainable Development Goals in general, and environmental-oriented innovations in particular. Our study expands the argument that collaboration with outsiders is a key capability to advance towards environmental innovation and to acquire and provide unique resources and knowledge to facilitate the environmental innovation process.
Nowadays firms are not able to achieve all innovation in-house due to the specific set of technologies required by most products and processes, obliging firms to access external knowledge. In this context, the aim of this chapter is two-fold with the final goal of increasing our knowledge on firm innovating behavior. First, this chapter analyzes the determinants of the R&D strategy (RDS) selection posting the make, buy and make-buy as the three RDSs. Second, this chapter analyzes the consequences that each of the RDSs has on firm innovativeness. Results show that commercial and organizational resources, jointly with the information sources, influence the selection of the strategy. As for the second part of the analysis, we see that all RDSs have positive effects on firm innovative performance but these effects are not straightforward and simple since they vary depending on firm´s type and on the radicalness of the innovation achieved.
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