Abstract
Innovative solutions are often conjured as a key factor for companies to come closer to the goal of ecological sustainability. Furthermore, proactive eco-innovation activities can encompass competitive advantages. Companies are therefore well advised to tap any available source of innovation. However, although employees’ innovative capacity has often been described, to date, their manifold potentials for eco-innovation processes have hardly been examined in detail. The overarching research questions guiding this conceptual paper are why and how employee participation in eco-innovation processes can entail environmental and competitive advantages for companies. The authors introduce the concept of employee-driven eco-innovation (EDEI), defined here as ordinary employees’ voluntary engagement in innovation activities within an organizational context that, intentionally or not, lead to environmental improvements. This paper complements previous literature on employee-driven innovation (EDI) by applying it to the specific case of eco-innovation. In this context, employees’ comprehensive environmental competences resulting from “tacit knowledge”, “private consumer experience” and “green identity” are taken into account. In addition, we delineate critical intra-organizational factors for EDEI activities and illustrate green employees’ specific requirements in this regard.
Highlights
Consumers and employees expect it, legislators dictate it, NGOs monitor it—the pressure exerted by external and internal stakeholders increasingly forces companies to address environmental issues [1,2]
We introduce the concept of employee-driven eco-innovation (EDEI)
To shed some light on the concept of EDEI, this paper explores the two questions why and how ordinary employees can play a decisive role in eco-innovation processes
Summary
Consumers and employees expect it, legislators dictate it, NGOs monitor it—the pressure exerted by external and internal stakeholders increasingly forces companies to address environmental issues [1,2]. In this situation, innovative solutions are seen as a key driver for improving companies’ environmental performance [1,3,4]. The idea of a democratization of innovation processes departs from the assumption that innovations emerge from expert groups and emanate from “non-experts” in communities of practice [13,14] This assertion is substantiated by Ramus [15] who argues that eco-innovations can arise at any organizational level and across departments. Ordinary employees, so far, still represent a mostly unrecognized internal source of eco-innovation in practice as well as in theory
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