Open for Green Innovation: From the Perspective of Green Process and Green Consumer Innovation

Abstract

This study is about open innovation, which suggests that companies should aim to cooperate with other companies or organizations for green innovation. While previous research has focused on the mechanism through which the company achieves green innovation, mainly from the supplier perspective, we have taken a more demand-driven approach to product innovation by introducing the green process and consumer perspectives. Also, this study not only considers collaboration with other companies whose interests are complicated in terms of open innovation but also cooperation with other organizations whose interests are unsophisticated. We examined the relationship between open innovation and green innovation by using the structural equation method and 2496 manufacturing companies in South Korea, and further confirmed the robustness by using OLS (ordinary least square) regression. As a result of the empirical analysis, all four hypotheses were supported, and the effect of collaboration with organizations was stronger than with firms. Based on these results, this study suggests that if managers prioritize green performance, they should consider co-prosperity with other companies and organizations. In addition, this study found that green innovation, which can contribute to the environment while consumers use products with green innovation, is also becoming central. Compared with previous studies, we expect that our alternative approaches to open and green innovation will contribute to corporate sustainability in the future.

Towards the open eco-innovation mode: A model of open innovation and green management practices

“…We find that open innovation with small firms can boost eco-innovation, which allows us to obtain the open eco-innovation mode. This finding contrasts against Yang and Roh (2019), recommending that the influence of open innovation by larger firms goes well on process eco-innovation, especially reducing the waste of products by consumers. Our finding is also supported by Ghisetti et al (2015), suggesting that external knowledge sourcing may improve the firm's coverage of the multiple knowledge needs involved by the multi-dimensionality of eco-innovation.…”

“…The idea of moving beyond an econometric measure as a measure of human capital is beginning to disclose in the literature (Ghisetti et al, 2015;Lopes et al, 2017;A. Triguero et al, 2018;Yang & Roh, 2019); our research's results proffer additional insights to this debate.…”

“…Triguero et al (2018) find similar results that there is a relationship between open innovative strategies and ecoinnovations (i.e., material-efficiency innovation, energy-efficiency innovation, and environmental responsiveness) in the Spanish food and beverage industry. In case of South Korea, Yang and Roh (2019) find open innovation collaborated with large organizations is more substantial than with small firms, suggesting that small firms should consider co-prosperity to eco-innovate with other companies. However, firms with an environmental management system tend to become more relevant to eco-innovation, they need to work on innovation and environmental performance (Khan et al, 2019).…”

“…A few studies (e.g., Ghisetti et al (2015), A. Triguero et al (2018), and Yang and Roh (2019)) have focused on efforts to identify the search-breadth and -depth strategies of external knowledge sourcing and customer demands through eco-innovation adoption. This is possible to form the concept of the open eco-innovation mode.…”

Green Innovation in Environmental Complexity: The Implication of Open Innovation

“…Companies open themselves up to the outside world to innovate by cultivating an authentic culture of open innovation [75]. They may benefit from incorporating outside expertise from an open-innovation perspective and making the company boundaries permeable [76][77][78][79]. For example, by collaborating with customers and suppliers, companies can gain various environmental advantages from their innovations [15].…”