Green innovation is becoming increasingly important for companies and whole societies, and the research in this field has essentially increased in recent years. As green innovation is expected to ensure both environmental sustainability and economical profitability, it might seriously affect the partly colliding interests of various groups of stakeholders. However, from previous studies less is known about the impact that various groups of stakeholders and particularly the relationships among these stakeholders exert on the implementation of green innovations. To address this gap we first substantiate the relevance of the stakeholder theory for innovation studies in general and green innovations in particular. Furthermore, we argue that from the innovator's perspective green innovations are likely to be affected by the interactions with as well as between many primary and secondary stakeholders. To explore this issue in‐depth we conducted a case study of the implementation of an offshore wind farm in Germany. Our research revealed that network ties among stakeholders can be both conducive and detrimental to the green innovation. The insights gained in our study contribute to the stakeholder analysis for the implementation of green innovations.

Purpose Past research demonstrated that novel IT-based business models generate tremendous returns for innovators. However, the risks associated with these innovations remain under-explored. This paper aims to address this critical gap analyzing risks and offering important insights particularly for practitioners. Design/methodology/approach The authors adopted an exploratory multiple-case study research design. It draws on 22 semi-structured interviews with managers from leading energy utilities, as well as leading providers of virtual power plants technology within the German energy industry. Findings The research reveals that main risks in new digital business models in the energy sector are associated with three forms of interdependence between innovation actors: the regulatory, the technological and the collaborative. To deal with these interdependencies, the authors propose an original multi-step risk management framework. This framework considers the outreach as a critical dimension for risk assessment and offers a new risk response matrix to draw individual and collective mitigation activities for specific types of risks. Practical implications This paper offers a framework for the management of interdependence risks that are fundamental for business model innovations based on IT. Thus, it is applicable in companies both inside the energy sector and beyond. Originality/value This paper analyzes an important digital business model innovation that has not yet been explored in management literature – the virtual power plant (VPP). It is based on original and current empirical work and proposes a novel risk management framework for business organizations.

The concept of innovation ecosystems gained significant importance in academic research on strategy and practice over the last years. The emergence of the Internet of Things is disrupting industries and setting the ecosystem in the focus of innovation. Even traditional analog industries, like the energy industry, are under pressure to foster and manage ecosystems during their innovation efforts. Thus, the energy industry represents an appropriate setting for examining the evolution of an innovation ecosystem under the empirical lens of controversies, which describe the challenges of the status quo and is congruent with previous research on dialectical inquiries as source of innovation dynamics. For the purpose of this paper, the Actor-network theory (ANT) is regarded as an appropriate tool since it allows researchers to analyze how actors interact due to their specific interests with each other and thus configure the ecosystem in its base. ANT further enlarges the perspective of handling actors, while it involves not only human but also non-human actors (i.e. technologies). This is a valuable and necessary feature while dealing with digital innovations such as virtual power plants (VPP). By analyzing three how distinctive typologies, their mechanisms as well as their pathways of controversies affect the innovation ecosystem of VPPs and the evolution of the technological components of the innovation, this interaction between human and non-human actors is highlighted. In consequence, our research emphasizes the significance of involving nonhuman actors into managerial strategies and the role they inherit for the evolution of ecosystems. Furthermore, the present research reveals that controversies are not only a moderating factor but also a constitutional one for the coevolution of the ecosystem as well as the innovation itself especially during the forming phases. With respect to recent research of the management of digital innovation, this paper contributes to a better understanding of managerial challenges associated with digital innovation and their respective ecosystems.

In this paper, we examine to what extent the firm's propensity to be embedded in a network with advantageous structural attributes is driven by its capabilities for network management. Specifically, we discern network management practices on two organizational levels (relationship management (RM) and portfolio management (PM)) and explore their effects on three dimensions of local network structure (network centrality (NC), knowledge complementarity (KC), and tie strength (TS)). To test our hypotheses, we collect sociometric survey data from the largest inter-firm network in the German energy industry. The results indicate that intra-firm processes for network management indeed are key enablers of structural network advantages. Further, we demonstrate that RM and PM exert distinct effects: PM helps the firm improve NC, RM leads to increased TS, and KC results from an additive effect of the two capabilities. In all, our work contributes to theory on strategic networks by providing an integrated perspective on how network structure and network management benefit innovation performance.

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