Many technology-intensive (TI) firms find it challenging to leverage customisation and achieve sustainable innovation. Although some firms use modularity to tackle this challenge, mixed effects on sustainable innovation have been reported. This study uses organisational learning and ambidexterity theory to provide insights into how TI firms can achieve 'winwin' situations where sustainable innovation is increased through customisation. First, we argue that customisation should be viewed two-dimensionally and identify both modularity and solution space freedom as important dimensions. We argue that modularity reflects knowledge specialisation and solution space freedom reflects knowledge variety. Both of these dimensions affect organisational learning and, in turn, sustainable innovation. Second, we argue that the relationship between customisation and organisational learning is affected by supplier characteristics, specifically supplier sophistication. Survey data from 166 managers were used to empirically test the conceptual model and hypotheses. Polynomial response surface analysis confirms that customising by balancing high degrees of both modularity and solution space freedom results in superior organisational learning. High levels of supplier sophistication do not strengthen these effects. Rather, our results show that combining high degrees of modularity with constrained solution spaces increases learning for TI firms working with less sophisticated suppliers. In addition, organisational learning fully mediates the effect of customisation on sustainable product and process innovation.Keywords: modularity; solution space; customisation; organisational learning; sustainable innovation IntroductionTo adapt to global competitive pressures, firms must accommodate heterogeneous customer needs while mitigating the ecological and environmental impact (Boër et al. 2013;Medini, Da Cunha, and Bernard 2015). On the one hand, the consumerisation of business-to-business (B2B) buying results in customers insisting on complex solutions against lower costs (Davie, Stephenson, and De Uster 2010;Lingqvist, Plotkin, and Stanley 2015). On the other hand, increasing global environmental concerns prompt firms to pay more attention to sustainable innovation, i.e. creating or improving products and processes to contribute to the ecological environment (Boons et al. 2013;Chen, Lai, and Wen 2006;Fiksel et al. 2014;Flores et al. 2008;Foxon and Pearson 2008). While firms have to pursue both customisation and sustainable innovation to remain competitive (Boër et al. 2013;Medini, Da Cunha, and Bernard 2015), pursuing both of these goals jointly is perceived as being very difficult (Boër et al. 2013).The manufacturing paradigms of customisation and sustainable innovation are frequently referred to in the literature, yet mainly treated in isolation. Recent research has brought the two paradigms together and has proposed to simultaneously model customisation and sustainability (e.g. Boër et al. 2013;Medini, Da Cunha, and Bernard 2015). How...

As consumer interest in organic products continues to grow, brands are increasingly adding organic variants to their product lines. However, consumer evaluations of these actions are not straightforward and differ for brands with various associations or within different product contexts. Previous research has shown that products with credence attributes, such as organic products, are often judged by brand name and consumers' existing brand associations. The current study adds to previous work on brand equity and brand associations by explicitly considering the context and characteristics of these branded organic products. First, a pretest determined the existing brands' corporate social responsibility (CSR) and corporate ability (CA) associations. Next, an online experiment tested consumers' perceptions of brand equity, consumers' trust in the brands and consumers' purchase intentions, which were analyzed using a fully parallel, multiple-mediator process model with the experimental conditions as independent variables. The results show that brand equity increases most when a brand associated with both CA and CSR introduces an organic product. In addition, consumers trust this brand more compared to brands that are less strongly associated with CSR. Moreover, the intention to purchase organic products increases as brand equity increases, but the intention to purchase organic products does not increase as trust increases. Based on these results, we conclude that brands aiming to increase their value to positively affect consumers' purchase intentions of their organic products benefit most when they are highly associated with both CSR and CA.