Organizational Agility and Communicative Actions for Responsible Innovation: Evidence from manufacturing firms in South Korea

Abstract

Responsible Innovation (RI) has increasingly attracted attention in academic research and business practice for UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Especially, the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP) highlights RI as a key concept to address how to institutionalize and organize action programs to solve grand challenges. However, we know little about the determinants of organizing RI in business. By applying agile management and stakeholder theory, this study proposes the critical organizational factors to implement RI, namely: Organizational Agility and Communicative Actions. Based on the large-scale data analysis of 13,234 South Korean manufacturing firms during the period between 1999 and 2019, this paper investigates whether and how organizational factors can affect RI in the Asian context, using the zero-inflated negative binomial regression model. Findings show that well-organized agile management and communicative actions with stakeholders are essential to enhance RI performance in a holistic view. This study contributes to the recently emerging field of RI and offers novel theoretical and practical implications for academics and practitioners regarding the underlying mechanism of organizing RI.