Sustainability Orientation in New Product Development: Antecedents and Managerial Implications

摘要

Sustainability has become a prominent item on the corporate agenda. Senior executives are increasingly concerned with how they could foster a culture that embeds sustainability into their business models. While sustainability has generated significant interests among practitioners and academics, its implementation pertaining to corporate new product development (NPD) has received little research attention to date. Incorporating sustainability into a firm's product development efforts is expected to garner significant benefits, including greater customer focus and higher NPD performance. However, how to establish and cultivate sustainability orientation that delivers these benefits and facilitates successful NPD outcomes is not well understood. Shedding light on this research gap should help to foster an understanding of how and under what circumstances sustainability orientation can benefit innovating firms. Establishing a sustainability orientation likely requires top management direction, a culture of continuous improvement fed by information flows from both internal and external sources, and responsiveness to the multi-faceted needs of customers and other stakeholders in increasingly global markets. Consequently, the current research develops and tests a framework of antecedents of sustainability orientation in the NPD context. Specifically, we examine the effects of a firm's innovation strategy, global perspective, and open innovation activities on its sustainability orientation. We also examine the mediating role of sustainability orientation in linking these antecedent conditions to NPD outcomes.