Eco-Innovation Behavior And Its Performance In Agri-Enterprises

Eco-innovation can enhance the efficiency of resource and develop new economic opportunities. The products and services provided by agri-enterprises are derived from ecosystems directly or indirectly, related to the health and nutritional status of consumers, thus agri-enterprises are good driver and enabler of eco-innovation. However, lacks of the literature on the agri-enterprise eco-innovation make it difficult for researchers and practitioners to gain an overview of the eco-innovation behaviors in agri-enterprises. The purpose of the paper is to explore the operating mechanism of eco-innovation in agri-enterprises and the relationship between eco-innovation and performance by exploratory case study through coding 10 cases and about 70,000 words with grounded theory approach.An iterative procedure is used on the open coding stage to name, conceptualize and categorize the materials, obtaining 131 concepts and 24 categorizes. Those categorizes are distributed to six causal levels on stage of axial coding. The properties in each level are clustered into different levels of eco-innovation structure model of agri-enterprises on stage 3. The proposed eco-innovation structure model can not only descript the overall operation of eco-innovation but also can assess the operational performance in agri-enterprises. Eco-innovation motivations in agri-enterprises are policy-driven, profit-driven and corporate social responsibility-driven, the study analyzed the eco-innovation performance under different motivation-driven and found that the eco-innovation behaviors under spontaneous profit-driven usually brought better financial performance and eco-performance,eco-innovation behavior driven by the corporate social responsibility often brought high social status and good corporate image, the stimulating policy-driven has better operating performance than the access policy-driven in short term. For above findings, we finally provided practical advice to promoting eco-innovation practices for agri-enterprises and government.