The role of internal capabilities and firms' environment for sustainable innovation: evidence for Germany

Abstract

Over the past decade, sustainable innovation has occupied a top-ranking position on the agenda of many firms. Sustainable innovation can be broadly defined as an innovation that has to consider environmental and social issues as well as the needs of future generations. Although sustainable innovation provides considerable new opportunities for companies it goes along with an increased complexity. This in turn requires certain organizational routines and capabilities to deal with the upcoming challenges. We explore what the specific driving forces are that increase the degree of sustainable innovation within a firm's innovation activities. We test them empirically for more than 1,100 firms in Germany and find that firms need to invest in internal absorptive capacities and to draw both broadly and deeply from external sources for innovation. In that sense, investments in employee training turn out to be more important than technological R&D expenditures.

The Pursuit of External Knowledge in Eco-Innovation. Analysis of the Agri-Food Sector in Spain

“…A large number of ideas will impede the adequate selection and exploitation of processes (Koput, 1997). Thus, as regards environmental concerns, there is a need for the multitudinous interests of the various external agents to be filtered and reduced, prioritizing and selecting those most attuned to the firm's interests (Ketata et al, 2015); as such, Hypothesis 1a, on the breadth of cooperation networks, does not hold.…”

“…As such, the greater the number of sources used by the firm, the greater its level of openness will be to developing strategies for pursuing external sources (Laursen & Salter, 2006). This measurement has been utilized and adapted by various empirical works in respect of its relationship with eco-innovation (Cainelli et al, 2015;Ketata et al, 2015;Ghisetti, Marzucchi & Montresor, 2015); this illustrates the importance of studying breadth as far as innovation strategies are concerned.…”

Innovative Activity as a Factor of Mining Region Sustainable Development

“…The latter is understood as production with the help of ecologically harmless and efficient processes that allow saving resources, reduce harmful impact on the environment and improve the safety and health conditions for all agents of economic relations. [2][3][4][5] …”

“…Another factor to be highlighted is the steady innovations researched by the scientists of the Georgia International Business Institute and the Copenhagen Business School. [2] Sustainable innovations take into account the environmental, social consequences and interests of future generations. They offer new perspectives for enterprises development, but they are associated with the need for certain costs, organizational efforts and competencies for solving the problems.…”

Sustainability-Oriented Innovation in the Minerals Industry: An Empirical Study on the Effect of Non-Geographical Proximity Dimensions

“…Anglo American initiated an open collaboration forum, FutureSmart TM , including different stakeholders such as suppliers, research groups and companies from other industries in order to find more efficient and more sustainable ways to create and capture value [8]. LKAB, the large Swedish mining company, followed this approach an easy task to differentiate between these notions, it has been argued that the inconsistency in using these notions stems from the variance in terms of emphasis on different aspects of sustainability [25]. For instance, whereas eco-innovation seeks to integrate environmental and economic improvements [26], sustainable innovation broadens this scope by incorporating social considerations to the aforementioned aspects [28].…”