This is a repository copy of Performance effects of complementarity between environmental management systems and environmental technologies.

Environmental management standards (EMS) are important voluntary management tools that aim at reducing the environmental impact of firms' activities. From ethical motivations through increasingly high pressure from regulatory authorities to expected financial returns, reasons to adopt an EMS are manifold. While they all certainly matter, it is still unclear from the literature which firm-specific organisational capabilities and structural characteristics significantly drive adoption. Using Propensity Score Matching (PSM) on two samples of French firms, we identify firm-specific factors associated with the early or late adoption of ISO 14001-type EMS and we test whether adoption increases labour productivity. We find that adopters are moderately large manufacturing firms that rely on ISO 9001 standards or Total Quality Management. In addition, according to the first sample, early adopters tend to be more technologically complex firms that are active in the European market. These differences are attenuated in the second sample, which may be biased towards more innovative firms. Both samples however concur with the conclusion that, whether early or late, adoption is associated with a higher labour productivity compared to non-adoption. This result still holds when we use fully interacted linear models instead of PSM, and seems to be consistent over time. Thus, implementing EMS might provide win-win opportunities to adopters, without giving any premium to ''early birds''.Standardisation and industrial regulations have played a major role in improving the quality, safety and reliability of the goods and services that we use today.Organizations implement increasingly technical industrial standards, which are often imposed by policy-setting institutions or through industry-level agreements. Others, though, are non-manda-tory, which raises the question of the determinants of their adoption. This is the case in particular of environmental management standards (EMS) such as ISO 14001.

Résumé L’importance de l’innovation environnementale (ou “éco-innovation”) est maintenant bien établie dans la communauté des chercheurs travaillant sur l’innovation. Ce survol de la littérature passe en revue les contributions les plus importantes dans ce domaine. Les travaux théoriques suggèrent que, si le concept d’éco-innovation n’est pas encore complètement stabilisé, les définitions récentes tendent à se baser sur la performance environnementale plutôt que sur un objectif environnemental défini a priori . Les travaux empiriques indiquent qu’à côté des déterminants usuels de l’innovation, la politique de l’environnement a un fort impact sur l’éco-innovation. Ceci est lié à la nature même de l’éco-innovation, qui présente certaines des caractéristiques d’un “bien public”. Nous examinons également certains aspects encore peu explorés de l’innovation environnementale, et en particulier sa diffusion. Si l’éco-innovation est aussi bénéfique qu’on le prétend, alors une meilleure compréhension de ses mécanismes de diffusion est nécessaire.

PurposePrior research on open innovation has not investigated changes in knowledge acquisition strategies of firms over time overlooking how learning from past knowledge acquisition can change subsequent search strategies. Also, prior research has focused principally on product innovation overlooking process innovation. The purpose of the paper is to introduce the concept of dynamic openness, which is defined as temporal changes in external knowledge search strategy. We explore four dynamic openness strategies – closing down, opening up, persistent open and persistent closed – and examine the impact of these strategies on both product and process innovation.Design/methodology/approachThe authors used a panel dataset of 16,021 firms based on five waves (2009–2017) of the UK Community Innovation Survey (UKIS). All models are estimated using firm and year fixed effects (FE) method to control for endogeneity that arises from unobserved heterogeneity. Endogeneity and robustness tests were carried out to ensure the validity of results.FindingsThe results show that firms do use dynamic openness strategies over time leveraging learning from past searches. Specifically, the study indicates that closing down is not an effective strategy for either type of innovation. For process innovation, firms should pursue opening up strategy rather than persistent open strategy, whereas for product innovation firms could pursue either strategy, highlighting important contextual differences.Originality/valueThe paper contributes to the literature on knowledge acquisition in open innovation: (1) by theorizing the underlying reasons – learning from past collaborations, absorptive capacity and external knowledge heterogeneity – why firms pursue one dynamic openness strategy over another and (2) by extending literature by delineating the dynamic openness strategies that firms should pursue in process innovation vs product innovation.