How Do Anticipated and Self Regulations and Information Sourcing Openness Drive Firms to Implement Eco-Innovation? Evidence from Korean Manufacturing Firms.

Cheon Yu,Yun Seop Hwang,Junghoon Park

doi:10.3390/ijerph16152678

Abstract

Building upon institutional theory and the concept of openness to external sources in terms of breadth and depth, this study investigates the following three understudied drivers of eco-innovation in terms of external and internal factors: Anticipated regulation and self-regulation as external drivers, and information sourcing openness comprised of breadth and importance as internal drivers. Toward this end, this study employs a sample of 1824 Korean manufacturing firms collected from the Korean Innovation Survey 2010, which is compatible with the Oslo Manual and the Eurostat Community Innovation Survey (CIS). The current research adopts a multivariate probit model for the nine binary outcome variables and a zero-inflated negative binomial (ZINB) regression model for a count variable. It is found that, both anticipated regulation and self-regulation positively affect eco-process innovation and eco-product innovation across all of the nine eco-innovation types. The empirical findings on the effects of the breadth of external sources and the importance of used information acquired from external sources for innovative activities indicate that both the breadth and the importance have positive impacts on the number of types of eco-innovation with which a firm is engaged.

Highlights

Large-scale societal challenges related to the natural environment, such as climate change and loss of biodiversity, have become major concerns for firms, regulators, intergovernmental actors, and civil society, due to the significant consequences of these challenges [1,2,3]
The results regarding the effects of anticipated regulation on eco-innovation are somewhat different to the empirical findings suggested by a few prior studies [7,9,25,61]
Triguero et al [25] suggested that future regulation does not have impacts on either eco-process or eco-product innovation, while Doran and Ryan [9] provided an empirical result showing that expected regulation only has significant impacts on two types of eco-process innovation and one type of eco-product innovation. These results indicate that firms make efforts to gain social legitimacy by pre-empting any future shifts in environmental regulations imposed by the government

Summary

Introduction

Large-scale societal challenges related to the natural environment, such as climate change and loss of biodiversity, have become major concerns for firms, regulators, intergovernmental actors, and civil society, due to the significant consequences of these challenges [1,2,3]. Under these circumstances, securing resources and capabilities to address such challenges has been crucial for businesses to bolster their competitiveness [4], which is normally accompanied by increased demands and pressures from different types of stakeholders on a firm’s pursuit of eco-innovation [5]. Public Health 2019, 16, 2678; doi:10.3390/ijerph16152678 www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph

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Results

Conclusion