Title: Are innovation resources and capabilities enough to make businesses sustainable? An empirical study of leading sustainable innovative firms

Authors: Sarah Behnam; Raffaella Cagliano

Addresses: Institute of Industrial Technologies and Automation (ITIA), National Research Council of Italy (CNR), Via Alfonso Corti, 12, Milan, 20133, Italy ' School of Management, Politecnico di Milano, Via Lambruschini 4b, 20156 Milano, 20156, Italy

Abstract: Increasingly, innovations aimed at sustainable development have occupied a top position in businesses' planning. Thus, this paper is aimed at contributing to the ongoing and current debate on sustainability-oriented innovation (SOI) development. Despite SOI's ability to bring forward new opportunities for companies, it is accompanied by increased complexity, which, in turn, may require adjustments to innovation resources and capabilities to address the challenges that arise. Starting from a conceptual framework of requisite resources and capabilities for innovations, we test these resources and capabilities empirically in five leading SOI firms. The results show that innovative SOI firms need to strengthen their exploration and exploitation capabilities, including unifying the incorporation of internal and external resources with a clear orientation. In that sense, these adjustments are hypothesised to be more important than R&D expenditures, symbolic capital growth and knowledge formalisation.

Keywords: sustainability; sustainable development; innovation management; sustainability oriented innovation; SOI; intangible resources; organisational capabilities; exploration and exploitation; knowledge retention; internal collaboration; external collaboration; open innovation; research and development; R&D.

DOI: 10.1504/IJTM.2019.096510

International Journal of Technology Management, 2019 Vol.79 No.1, pp.1 - 20

Accepted: 17 Dec 2017
Published online: 05 Dec 2018 *

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