Toward green innovation ecosystems: past research on green innovation and future opportunities from an ecosystem perspective

Abstract

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to synthesize the extant literature on green innovation (GI), and more importantly, to provide future directions for GI research from the innovation ecosystem (IE) perspective.Design/methodology/approachA systematic literature review is conducted to summarize the status of current GI research, followed by content analysis to identify connectivity and crossovers between key concepts in the bodies of GI and IE literature. Then, the authors propose a green innovation ecosystem (GIE) framework and offer recommendations for future research on GI.FindingsIt is evident that the bodies of GI and IE literature overlap on the roles of external actors, and yet, there is scant research investigating GI activities from the IE perspective. Moreover, there are multiple directions worthy of future research applying the proposed GIE framework.Originality/valueThough the concept of ecosystem has become pervasive in innovation management research, this study is one of the first works to introduce IE concepts and propositions in the GI research context. This paper provides new knowledge on GIEs and sets the basis for further investigation.

Green innovation ecosystem and water performance in the food service industry: The effects of environmental management controls and digitalization

“…Approximately 240,000 restaurant owners and employees have participated in the iFood program to innovate their business models and procedures (iFood, 2021). Furthermore, our findings confirm extant research on the positive relationship between multiagent cooperation and the co‐creation of strategies in increasing both digitalization and environmental awareness within firms (Fan et al, 2022). Similar to Xin et al (2022), our results demonstrate that in the GIE, multiagent cooperation can contribute to promoting, either directly or indirectly, GI via resource sharing among actors operating within the innovation ecosystem.…”

“…Recent research (e.g., Fan et al, 2022) (e.g., Esposito et al, 2022;Qin et al, 2022;Yi & Zhang, 2022), our analysis advances the knowledge concerning multiagent cooperation within the GIE by including the following agents: firms and their suppliers, competitors, associations, customers, universities, governments, and the natural environment. Our results show that the GIE positively affects the digitalization of firms, thus confirming H1a.…”

Guest editorial: Deconstructing business ecosystems: complementarity, capabilities, co-creation and co-evolution

“…The six papers in this special issue cover multiple aspects of ecosystems, including complementarity, capabilities, co-creation and co-evolution (see Table 1). It is noted that four papers focus on innovation ecosystems, including one paper on green innovation system (Fan et al , 2022) and another one on digital innovation system (Li et al , 2022b). Indeed, both green innovation and digital innovation have attracted close attention in academia and practice in the recent years (Li et al , 2022a; Vial, 2019).…”

“…However, other actors like not-for-profit organizations (NPOs), government agencies, universities and research institutes, are not sufficiently investigated in terms of their roles in the ecosystem and their links with other actors. As Fan et al (2022) have noticed some important actors like influencers are largely neglected in the current ecosystem literature. In other words, this could be a promising research direction to investigate those overlooked actors in business ecosystems.…”

“…Under the condition of resource insufficiency, keystones should break the boundaries of the business ecosystem and acquire external resources to meet the resource needs of complementors. Fan et al (2022) investigate a particular type of ecosystem, i.e. green innovation ecosystem.…”