Toward green innovation ecosystems: past research on green innovation and future opportunities from an ecosystem perspective
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/IMDS-12-2021-0798 |
| Published date | 14 July 2022 |
| Date | 14 July 2022 |
| Pages | 2012-2044 |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Information systems,Data management systems,Knowledge management,Knowledge sharing,Management science & operations,Supply chain management,Supply chain information systems,Logistics,Quality management/systems |
| Author | Xinyi Fan,Xueshu Shan,Steven Day,Yongyi Shou |
Toward green innovation
ecosystems: past research on green
innovation and future
opportunities from an
ecosystem perspective
Xinyi Fan, Xueshu Shan, Steven Day and Yongyi Shou
School of Management, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China
Abstract
Purpose –The purpose of this paper is to synthesize the extant literature on green innovation (GI), and more
importantly, to provide future directions for GI research from the innovation ecosystem (IE) perspective.
Design/methodology/approach –A systematic literature review is conducted to summarize the status of
current GI research, followed by content analysis to identify connectivity and crossovers between key concepts
in the bodies of GI and IE literature. Then, the authors propose a green innovation ecosystem (GIE) framework
and offer recommendations for future research on GI.
Findings –It is evident that the bodies of GI and IE literature overlap on the roles of external actors, and yet,
there is scant research investigating GI activities from the IE perspective. Moreover, there are multiple
directions worthy of future research applying the proposed GIE framework.
Originality/value –Though the concept of ecosystem has become pervasive in innovation management
research, this study is one of the first works to introduce IE concepts and propositions in the GI research
context. This paper provides new knowledge on GIEs and sets the basis for further investigation.
Keywords Green innovation, Innovation ecosystem, Systematic literature review, Content analysis,
Green innovation ecosystem
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
Over the last decades, the accelerating consumption of natural resources and worsening
environmental pollution have become serious concerns across society, culminating in the
United Nations’Paris Agreement of 2015. Consequently, firms are simultaneously pushed by
more stringent environmental regulations and policies (Liu et al., 2022) and pulled by stronger
customer demands for environment-friendly products or services (Dahlquist, 2021). However,
the actual implementation of this impetus remains difficult as environmental improvements
have been seen as a cost driver (Abbec and Lanoie, 2008). Therefore, an effective strategy for
firms to address environmental concerns while consolidating their competitive advantages
has become the focus of both industry and academia. In today’s knowledge economy,
innovation is effective in spurring firm growth. Thus, green innovation (GI) is proposed,
which refers to “hardware or software innovation that is related to green products or
processes, including the innovation in technologies that are involved in energy-saving,
pollution-prevention, waste recycling, green product designs, or corporate environmental
management”to align environmental and financial objectives simultaneously (Chen et al.,
2006, p. 332).
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122,9
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This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number:
71821002].
Declaration of interests: none
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
https://www.emerald.com/insight/0263-5577.htm
Received 30 December 2021
Revised 18 May 2022
14 June 2022
Accepted 28 June 2022
Industrial Management & Data
Systems
Vol. 122 No. 9, 2022
pp. 2012-2044
© Emerald Publishing Limited
0263-5577
DOI 10.1108/IMDS-12-2021-0798
While it is widely agreed that GI benefits firm performance (Hizarci-Payne et al., 2021), the
double externality problem remains a significant barrier to further investments in practice
(Rennings, 2000). Since benefits of GI only partially accrue to the focal firm, they often emerge
from cooperative relationships across organizational boundaries where investments and
gains can be shared (Arfi et al., 2018). The work of De Marchi (2012) shows that firms
successful in GI cooperate more with external partners than firms successful in other types of
innovation.
This view of GI matches with the innovation ecosystem (IE) concept, which is defined as
“the collaborative arrangements through which firms combine their individual offerings into
a coherent, customer-facing solution”(Adner, 2006, p. 98). Different from previous innovation
concepts emphasizing the role of external partners like open innovation and value networks,
the IE concept assumes deliberate intent and focuses on the alignment between various
ecosystem actors rather than a single entity’s competitive advantages (Adner, 2017;Oh et al.,
2016). In recent years, as inter-organizational relationships have become more complex
because of advances in information technologies, the IE concept has gained enthusiasm
among both industry practitioners and popular business presses since it provides a new
perspective to depict the complex business environment (Jones et al., 2021). Since GI is
developed by and distributed within complex networks beyond traditional value chain or
supply chain boundaries (e.g. Beltagui et al., 2020;Xie and Wang, 2020), we argue that it is
timely to introduce an ecosystem perspective in the GI research.
To the best of our knowledge, there are a few studies that have considered IE concepts in
the GI research. For example, Yang et al. (2021) have investigated the evolution of a particular
kind of green innovation ecosystem (GIE), the government–university–industry alliance
under environmental regulations. Nylund et al. (2021) have elaborated the roles of
multinational enterprises in different evolutionary phases of multinational GIEs. While the
existing literature offers evidence of some specific kinds of GIEs in industry practice, there is
no universal GIE framework to identify what new insights the introduction of IE concepts
and propositions can bring to the GI research. To fill such a prominent research gap, we aim
to answer the following research question:
RQ1. Which topics in green innovation research can be discussed from the emergent
innovation ecosystem perspective?
A systematic literature review (SLR) can help scholars to identify research areas and questions
that future research will make an influence effectively (Siddh et al., 2017). Thus, to understand GI
research directions from the IE perspective, we conduct a SLR of the GI literature and locate
concepts related to IE within that literature. This focus on the potential interchanges between
both bodies of literature clusters distinguishes our work from previous reviews that have
considered either GI (e.g. Takalo et al., 2021;Schiederig et al., 2012)orIEtopics(e.g.Dedehayir
et al., 2018;Gomes et al., 2018;Oh et al.,2016;Ritala and Almpanopoulou, 2017;Senyoet al.,2019).
In so doing, our review offers knowledge on the existing crossovers between the GI and IE
research streams. More importantly, based on our review, we propose a framework for GIE,
which refers to the interaction structure of multiple parties for a focalvalue propositionrelatedto
green products or processes. Thus, our study may draw scholars’attention to business
phenomena in GIEs and provide a foundation for future GI research as our work makes research
recommendations on how GI scholars may incorporate the IE perspective into their work.
2. Research design
To answer our research question, we identity four specific review objectives as follows:
(1) To investigate the development of the body of GI literature
Toward green
innovation
ecosystems
2013
(2) To identity theories and topics underpinning the body of GI literature
(3) To identity existing crossovers between the bodies of GI and IE literature
(4) To propose a GIE framework and provide future research opportunities into GIEs
To achieve these review objectives, we adopt a hybrid research method. For Review
Objectives 1 and 2, we conduct a SLR to capture the existing GI research following the
recommendations by Tranfield et al. (2003). We first portray the distribution of GI articles
across time periods and main journals, followed by a summarization of theoretical
foundations. Second, we use the text-mining software Leximancer to develop a concept map
visualizing key concepts and their interrelationships in the GI literature. For Review
Objective 3, we first employ Leximancer to extract key concepts from existing IE studies
collected following a rigorous literature search procedure. These IE concepts are then added
into the GI concept seed set manually to generate a new GI concept map. The new concept
map is compared with the original one to identify crossovers and connectivity between both
bodies of literature. Regarding Review Objective 4, based on the IE framework of Adner
(2017), we classify the overlaps and potential gaps according to the content analysis results
and then propose a GIE framework with possible future research directions.
2.1 GI literature search and analysis procedures
We search two leading databases, Web of Science and Scopus, which contain the majority of
the academic literature in the field of business management (Haug, 2021;N
u~
nez-Merino et al.,
2020). We search for peer-reviewed academic papers in English published in the period
ranging from 2000 to August 2021, and specify search terms appearing in titles, keywords,
and abstracts. Our search terms consist of two sets referring to both parts of the GI concept:
“green”,“eco”,“ecological”and “environmental”refer to the environmentally beneficial scope
of GI, while “innovation”and “R&D”represent the associated activity. We apply the Boolean
operator “AND”to account for all possible combinations between the terms from each set.
Therefore, the following string (“green innovation”OR “environmental innovation”OR “eco
innovation”OR “ecological innovation”OR “green R&D”OR “environmental R&D”OR “eco
R&D”OR “ecological R&D”) is used for searching.
We also employ two preliminary screening criteria. First, we apply a quality criterion by
only including academic papers in journals ranked “A*”or “A”in the 2019 Australian
Business Deans’Council (ABDC) journal ranking list since these journals have high impact in
academia (Lim et al., 2021). The ABDC list is widely accepted as a benchmark database for
business journals of international standard (Hao et al., 2021). Moreover, this list offers an
explicit classification of business research, easing us to screen out relevant journals (Hao
et al., 2021;Soosay and Hyland, 2015). Second, we employ a content criterion by only
including papers from journals belonging to the “Management”and “Information Systems”
categories in the ABDC list since these two fields are explicitly relevant for our review which
is of the innovation management discipline (Lim et al., 2021). Our initial search in the Web of
Science and Scopus databases returns 693 and 661 results, respectively. A total of 808 papers
remains in our sample after excluding duplicates.
To ensure the relevance of these papers to our studied topic, two researchers screen the
papers independently based on three a priori screening criteria (Tranfield et al., 2003).
Disagreements are settled through discussion until mutual recognition is achieved. To be
selected, the papers need to offer insights into firms’GI practices. Thus, the following types of
papers are excluded: (1) papers focusing on a higher-level unit of analysis (e.g. an industry or
a geographical region), (2) non-empirical papers (e.g. pure modeling or conceptual work) and
(3) papers which do not treat GI as a core construct (e.g. green supply chain management
studies that may tangentially mention GI but do not elaborate on it). Hence, 470 articles are
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