Organizational improvisation and corporate green innovation: A dynamic capability perspective

Abstract

The march toward fusing business with sustainability is articulated with the hope of offering solutions to global environmental degradation. Green innovation is often regarded as an effective strategy to induce double externality with positive innovation and environmental spillovers. Despite numerous research works on determinants of green innovation, the key question, however, whether and how organizational improvisation exerts its influence on innovatively being green is still unsolved. On this basis, the current study seeks to demonstrate a connection between organizational improvisation and corporate green innovation. According to the presented theoretical framework, organizational improvisation, which serves as a catalyst for improving learning processes, promotes green innovation. Furthermore, dynamic capabilities mediate this relationship, and top management risk aversion could weaken the successful transformation of substantive innovation and being green. Empirical evidence is found based on a sample of Chinese manufacturing firms with a moderated mediation analysis. These results extend the understanding of the role of improvisation in green achievements towards the fusion of unplanned change and order.

Common institutional ownership and green innovation in family businesses: Evidence from China

“…Based on existing research, there are two main types of green innovation (Wang et al, 2021): one is green product innovation (Dangelico et al, 2017), which emphasizes the reduction of environmental impact from the product itself, and the other is green process innovation (Awan et al, 2020), which emphasizes process renewal from the selection of raw materials to the production and use of products to reduce pollutant emissions and improve energy efficiency (Xie et al, 2019). Compared with other types of innovation, green innovation has “double externalities” (Chen, Yuan, et al, 2023; Xiang et al, 2022). On the one hand, green innovation not only has positive externalities such as knowledge spillover and technology spillover; on the other hand, green innovation has negative externalities such as energy consumption and pollution emission.…”

“…Green innovation, as a key way to gain environmental legitimacy and promote the green transformation of enterprises, is considered an effective measure for enterprises to achieve a “win‐win” situation in terms of economic benefits and environmental protection (Berrone et al, 2013; Chen, 2008; Vasileiou et al, 2022). However, green innovation is characterized by “double externalities” (Chen, Yuan, et al, 2023; Xiang et al, 2022), it is not easy to get enterprises to take the initiative to promote green innovation. Hence, in the context of green development, it is of great practical significance to study how to promote enterprises to carry out green innovation activities and enhance their green innovation capability.…”

Do knowledge sharing and big data analytics capabilities matter for green absorptive capacity and green entrepreneurship orientation? Implications for green innovation

“…GI overcome environmental issues by greening business processes to increase resources efficiencies and decrease energy consumption (Sun et al, 2019), leveraging clean technologies to minimize CO2 emissions (Meirun et al, 2020b), introduces eco-friendly products (Dangelico et al, 2017), boost green entrepreneurial goals (Wang et al, 2022) and drive corporate social responsibility (Kraus et al, 2020). Based on the dynamic capability perspective, firms should acknowledge green innovation as a dynamic capability that should be continuously developed and reconfigured according to the existing environmental challenges (Chen et al, 2023). Thus, it needs to identify core competencies that should go green and create green competitive advantages (Qu et al, 2022).…”

“…The dynamic capability community scholars see green innovation as a unique and vital strategic solution for greening business operations and creating competitive advantages (Chen et al, 2023;Dangelico et al, 2017). This, in turn, supports entrepreneurs to reduce environmental impacts and increase green business performance (Qiu et al, 2020).…”

“…Thus responding to the increased customer environmental concerns and institutional and ecological pressures (Shehzad et al ., 2023). Based on the DCT approach, green innovation requires firms to search for and deploy valuable capabilities to improve green processes, develop eco-friendly products, use clean energies, and, in turn, create green competitive advantages and enhance ecosystem performance (Chen et al ., 2023; Dangelico et al ., 2017; Yu et al ., 2022). There is a strong justification from the dynamic capability literature supporting the notion that green innovation is a firm's capacity to respond to and neutralize green concerns to maintain survival in highly dynamic environmental issues (Arranz et al ., 2020; Ferreira et al ., 2020; Yousaf, 2021).…”