Abstract
Sustainable development has attracted the increasing attention of both researchers and practitioners. While academicians and practitioners’ focus towards sustainability has shifted to innovation, there is a need to understand how sustainability and innovation are interlinked. Thus, this paper attempts to analyze, first, the bidirectional impact of the firms’ pursuit of sustainability and innovation as the priority, second, the bidirectional impact of the adoption of sustainability innovation action programs and, third, to discern the bidirectional influence of sustainability and innovation performances. The evidence is drawn from a sample of 860 manufacturing plants in 22 countries from the sixth edition of the International Manufacturing Strategy Survey 2013. The survey was conducted using a self-administered questionnaire. Structural equation modelling has been employed to test the model. The results show that sustainability and innovation positively and significantly impact each other in terms of the adoption of their relevant action programs and performance. However, the pursuit of sustainability priority acts as an antecedent of innovation priority.
Highlights
IntroductionSince the release of World Commission on Environment and Development Report in 1987 (commonly known as the ‘Brundtland Commission Report’), research on sustainability has attracted increasing attention
Since the release of World Commission on Environment and Development Report in 1987, research on sustainability has attracted increasing attention
The results of the studies propose that the adoption of sustainability programs impacts the adoption of innovation programs and vice versa; because coordination programs for product innovation include cross-functional integration, employee involvement and leveraging firms’ ability to generate information, which in return would enhance the adoption of sustainability programs, (e.g., [50,51,52])
Summary
Since the release of World Commission on Environment and Development Report in 1987 (commonly known as the ‘Brundtland Commission Report’), research on sustainability has attracted increasing attention. Sustainable development encompasses a triple bottom line, a concept developed by [2], which integrates economic, environmental and social issues in operations. While environmental sustainability refers to consuming natural resources in a more advantageous manner and producing less emission to preserve the ecosystem [3], social sustainability refers to the skills’ preservation and enhancing health and quality of life [4]. This study, by adopting the sustainability concept considering both environmental and social perspectives simultaneously, primarily attempts to provide important value to the literature, especially in the operations management literature [5]. Studying sustainability from the Operations Management (OM) field is essential since companies have to consider the footprint left behind in terms of the resources used (e.g., energy) [3]. “given the impact of the manufacturing industry on the environment, people and economy, OM gives new opportunities to significantly contribute to sustainability” [6] (p. 1)
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