Abstract
Although improving energy efficiency has many benefits, including not only reducing pollution and climate change but also enhancing productivity and competitiveness, many firms still do not adopt energy efficiency innovation. In this study, we suggest inadequate attention allocation as a barrier to energy efficiency innovation, making firms fall into the intention-achievement gap when they simultaneously pursue multiple innovation-related goals. Due to limits in attention resources, competing innovation goals are likely to divert the firms’ focus of attention away from energy efficiency innovation, making them fail to achieve as much as they had initially intended. In addition, we argue that organizational innovation and government dependence will mitigate the attention dispersion effect of multiple goals by enhancing attention capacity and redirecting attention focus, respectively. We empirically examined our hypotheses in the context of Korean manufacturing industries between 2011 and 2013, using the Korean Innovation Survey 2014 data, and found supports for all hypotheses. In particular, we found that even a small increase in the diversity of innovation goals leads to a substantial likelihood of the intention-achievement gap and that organizational innovation and government dependence help to close the gap, but to a limited extent. Finally, theoretical contributions and practical implications are discussed.
Highlights
Improving energy efficiency reduces the amount of energy use required to produce and provide products and services
Given that firms have limited attention capacity [10], we argue that inadequate attention allocation can prevent them from realizing the strategic intent of energy efficient innovation, especially when they simultaneously pursue multiple competing innovation goals
Building upon the attention-based view of the firm (ABV) [10], we argue that competing innovation goals are likely to divert the firms’ focus of attention away from energy efficiency innovation, which can be mitigated by their organizational innovation and government dependency
Summary
Improving energy efficiency reduces the amount of energy use required to produce and provide products and services. Cagno et al [4] identified 27 barriers and proposed a taxonomy classifying these barriers into the following seven categories: technology-related, information-related, economic, behavioral, organizational, competence-related, and awareness They argued that these barriers variably interfere with the different stages of the decision-making process for energy efficiency innovation: (a) generation of awareness, (b) research of opportunities, and (c) implementation. Given that firms have limited attention capacity [10], we argue that inadequate attention allocation can prevent them from realizing the strategic intent of energy efficient innovation, especially when they simultaneously pursue multiple competing innovation goals. As we describe below, our data shows that many firms with an intention to innovate often attempt to concurrently achieve multiple objectives, such as new product development, operational process improvement, and new market entry. We discuss some practical implications for firm managers and policymakers
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