Green supply chain innovation: Emergence, adoption, and challenges

Abstract

Alongside many studies on greening efforts for supply chain activities, there is a research gap in understanding the emergence and adoption of green supply chain innovation (GSCI) in this digital-enabled Industry 4.0 era. This study defines GSCI as innovation practices by manufacturers that apply emergent digital technologies to integrate environmental concerns into supply chain management activities. GSCI is evolving as a new paradigm of green supply chain management (GSCM) to elevate its five underlying implementation dimensions. Manufacturing enterprises can benefit from digital technology applications to enhance efficiency of environmental outcomes of their GSCM activities, including internal environmental management, green purchasing, customer cooperation, inventory recovery, and eco-design. The GSCI concept gains growing attention in research and practice with popular digital technologies such as artificial intelligence, blockchain, cloud computing, and big data analytics increasingly adopted by manufacturers to improve their GSCM. So far, the literature lacks studies on GSCI to examine the concept, investigate the practices, explain the adoption motivations, consolidate and extend the knowledge on its adoption and diffusion. Based on a comprehensive review of GSCM literature, we explain the innovation for GSCM, and discuss the GSCI concept and practice focusing on digital technology applications with examples, and identify the challenges and opportunities for GSCI adoption and diffusion. We extend knowledge for this emerging GSCM field on digital technology applications.