Connecting strategic orientation, innovation strategy, and corporate sustainability: A model for sustainable development through stakeholder engagement

Abstract

This paper aims to enhance our understanding of the relationship between organizations ' strategic orientation (i.e., instrumental, equidistant, and stewardship) and their innovational strategy (i.e., organizational ambidexterity and open innovation), and this relationship's influence on their sustainability performance. We expected organizations' strategic orientation to influence their innovational strategy and exhibit better corporate sustainability. We focused on 12 different multinational organizations in the Eurozone and found that inbound open innovation acts as a driver for corporate sustainability while simultaneously positively enabling organizations to pursue both financial and social initiatives. After suggesting open innovation as a new corporate sustainability antecedent, we only found empirical evidence of inbound open innovation. However, we would suggest that if organizations incorporated outbound open innovation in their strategy, they could likely improve their corporate sustainability.Also, we found that achieving an equidistant or stewardship orientation paves the way for sustainability to become an integral part of an organization's innovational culture and actualizes the organization's strategic behavior. Our findings further contribute to a deeper understanding of organizations' characteristics as their sustainability commitment grows and as they move from an instrumental to a stewardship orientation and implement an open innovational strategy.

Green practices as an effective business strategy to influence the behavior of hotel guests in the luxury hotel sector: Evidence from an emerging market

“…Green practices have been planned and implemented as an effective business strategy to help firms fulfill environmental objectives and create unique value for customers and society (Khanra et al, 2022; Kumar et al, 2021; van Lieshout et al, 2021). In the hospitality industry, green practices are an essential part of a green strategy that hospitality companies engage in for sustainable development (Assaker, 2020).…”

Greening the business: How ambidextrous companies succeed in green innovation through to sustainable development

“…Companies use first‐order DCs, namely, essential resources, to increase competitive advantages and cope with changing environments (Zhang, 2014). The current volatile market conditions in which corporations operate make it hard for a corporation to achieve sustainable competitive advantages (van Lieshout et al, 2021). In fact, currently, companies are experiencing a new context where stakeholders scrutinize their sustainable practices.…”

“…Nonetheless, companies that have been exposed to exploratory principles of search, variation and risk‐taking respond to stakeholder pressures by venturing into sustainable practices, with a long‐term focus on profit‐making, a typical characteristic of exploratory activities (van Lieshout et al, 2021). Solís‐Molina et al (2018) have recognized that a company performs better with ambidexterity in some cases.…”

Creating shared value through open innovation approaches: Opportunities and challenges for corporate sustainability

“…The research questions of the extracted contributions (that are reported in Table 2) indicated that in many cases, companies are striving in their endeavors to build productive relationships with different stakeholders (Mtapuri et al, 2022;Peña-Miranda et al, 2022;Shaikh & Randhawa, 2022), to create value to their businesses as well as to society (Döll et al, 2022;Ghodbane, 2019;Roszkowska-Menkes, 2018). Very often, they confirmed that open innovation practitioners are promoting organizational governance (Aakhus & Bzdak, 2015;Sánchez-Teba et al, 2021), fair labor practices (Chang, 2020;Herrera & de las Heras-Rosas, 2020;Kumar & Srivastava, 2020;Schmidt-Keilich & Schrader, 2019), environmentally responsible investments (Aakhus & Bzdak, 2015;Cigir, 2018;Mendes et al, 2021;van Lieshout et al, 2021;Yang & Roh, 2019), and consumer-related issues (Greco et al, 2022;Loučanová et al, 2022;Wu & Zhu, 2021;Yang & Roh, 2019), among other laudable behaviors.…”

“…Currently, there are limited perspectives in academia linking open innovation approaches with the business ethics literature (Amor‐Esteban et al, 2019; Roszkowska‐Menkes, 2018). Even fewer are elaborating on the importance of forging fruitful and collaborative agreements with internal and external stakeholders, to foster social innovations in terms of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance (Ben Hassen & Talbi, 2022; Camilleri, 2022b; Ghodbane, 2019; Herrera & de las Heras‐Rosas, 2020; Kumar & Srivasava, 2020; Roszkowska‐Menkes, 2018; van Lieshout et al, 2021). Therefore, this contribution addresses a knowledge gap in academia.…”