The Drivers And Impact On Performance Of Corporate Ereen Innovation Strategy

Ever since industrial revolution, technical innovation has created tremendous economic wealth to the society. However, the increase of the economic wealth was largely at the cost of the deterioration of the ecological environment, which has been realized across the world as major impediment to a nation’s economic and social sustainability. On account of that, green innovation, deemed as a source of competitive advantage, has been taken into consideration during a firm’s strategic planning process. On the concern whether it is worthy to be green, traditional belief is that green innovation causes an economic loss, as a firm’s social and economic performance sometimes conflict. There exist some different opinions, like Porter’s "Win-Win hypothsis". Empirically, after more than thirty years’ efforts, the academic community still haven not reached an agreement. Besides, there also lacks incisive empirical study on the factors, both inside and outside firms that will intrigue green innovation.Based on Theory of Planned Behavior, this study explores the drivers of green innovation strategy, followed with an examination of green innovation’s related performance and the moderating effect of employee involvement on the green innovation-performance relationship. To specify them, this study mainly focuses the following problems:(1) Other than the common sense like environment regulation, is there any factor that would affect a firm’s green innovation strategy? If any, what are they?(2) How would a firm’s green innovation strategy affect its social performance as well as its economic performance?(3) Would employee involvement exert any effect on the green innovation-performance relationship?Drawing inspiration from recent research on innovation economics and strategic management, this study builds up a theoretical model for the drivers of green innovation and another one for the green innovation-performance relationship. Then, by a descriptive case study of three companies from different industries, this study examines its design effectiveness. Then, the study further specifies its major research methods, like questionnaire design process, scales development process, sample selection and the retrieve of questionnaires. Then, this study tests seven hypotheses empirically, taking correlation analysis and hierarchical regression analysis as key techniques. Finally, this study analyzed and discussed on the results, suggesting implications both theoretically and practically, and providing some possible future directions.Major conclusions are as follows:(1) Expected economic revenue, absorbed slack; and the strain from the governance, inside economic stakeholders and outside social stakeholders are proved to be positive drivers for firms to adopt green innovation strategy, while unabsorbed slack and outside economic stakeholders are not.(2) Green innovation is positively related with employee responsibility performance, product performance, environmental performance and corporate economic performance.(3) Employee involvement has a positive moderating effect on the green innovation-economic performance relationship, while there proves to be no such moderating effect on green innovation-social performance effect.On the whole, this study departs from Theory of Planned Behavior, explores the drivers of green innovation from a perspective of managers’ decision making, and examines its related effect on performance. This study has some contributions to the research community:(1) This study takes a decision-making perspective to explore the drivers of green innovation, instead of following the traditional innovation economics and institutional perspectives.(2) This study highlights the core concept "green innovation strategy" and uncovers the behavioral factors that affects a firm’s environmental management mode on a deeper level by suggesting different effects on green innovation from expected economic revenue, different kind of slack resource, and strain from various stakeholders.(3) This study extends traditional research on green innovation from external drivers to internal ones, like expected economic revenue and slack resource.