Greening Your New Products? Get a Partner! Green Innovation in Technological Networks

摘要

Across industry sectors, firms actively invest in green R&D to create novel, cleaner and greener, products and technologies, in response to growing consumer demands for eco-friendly products. The emerging stream in environmental management literature advocates the relevance of the networks perspective to analyze firm green innovation. Far-reaching consequences of environmental concerns have provoked more frequent and meaningful interactions between business and stakeholder communities, leading to emergence of complex relational networks where diverse social agents collaborate to create environmental and social value. Yet, most of extant research on the topic are case studies that analyze green innovation at the project or firm level and "often: do not explicitly address the mechanisms through which influencing factors affect innovative capacities" (Boons and Liideke-Freund 2013). Firms need better understanding how inter-firm relationships can be leveraged to enhance green innovation and maximize sustainability benefits. This paper provides partial answers to this question by exploring a firm's propensity to create green innovation in the context of networks of technological partnerships. The pat-terns and predictors of firm green innovation are explained by observing dynamic changes in knowledge and structural properties of technological networks at multiple levels.