Green New Product Development Research Articles

How to boost green innovation and performance through collaboration in the supply chain: Insights into a more sustainable economy

This study analyzes how supply chain leadership (SCL), supply chain followership (SCF) and green supply chain integration (GSCI) can contribute to green new product development (GNPD) and performance (PRF) through the effects of green innovation (GRI), considering the moderator role of customer pressure (CPR). In doing so, it provides new insights that can aid in understanding the importance of collaborative behavior in the supply chain that promotes sustainable benefits for companies and their stakeholders, stimulating green innovation as a key to making business more circular. ology: Using a structured questionnaire, this study gathers data from a cross-sectional sample of 425 supply chain partners of Portugal's biggest energy supplier. Structural equation modelling is used to test the proposed hypotheses, and the impact of customer pressure on the suggested relationships is assessed through a multi-group analysis. The findings suggest that SCL, SCF and GSCI positively impact GRI. Additionally, this study reveals that GNPD has a positive impact on PRF. Supply chain customer pressure appears to moderate some of the proposed relationships. This article provides some empirical evidence of the influence of SCL, SCF and GSCI on organizational value creation, contributing to a better understanding of the impacts of green innovation approaches on business sustainability . The overall results may support the importance of collaborative behavior in the supply chain for creating value for business, responding at the same time to the environmental sustainability challenges that humanity is facing, considering the role of customer pressure in moderating these relationships. Results show that, by being greener, a company may be more competitive, thus highlighting the importance of the collaboration between responsible and committed leaders and proactive followers for creating a better future for all. The research considered the suppliers of only one company. The relationships between variables need to be explored in other practical case studies and longitudinal research to improve the potential for extrapolating generalizations and establishing clear causalities.

Sustainable supply chain finance through digital platforms: a pathway to green entrepreneurship

This paper studies the green new product development (GNPD) problem of a risk-averse capital constrained supply chain (SC). The SC is managed by an SME entrepreneur, seeking financial support from a multi-sided FinTech platform (MSP) to develop a portfolio of green and non-green products. The MSP offers the SC a combination of equity financing (EF) and debt financing (DF) facilities and must decide on the interest rate of its DF facility. Using a benchmark model, we first characterize the SC’s production and the MSP’s financing decisions under a deregulated scenario. Focusing on an alternative case with government intervention (i.e., hybrid environmental-green entrepreneurship policy), we next develop a three-level game theoretical model and sequentially characterize the decision-making behavior of government, MSP, and SC. The model outcomes are analyzed by considering the policy approach (i.e., economic influence vs. social welfare) and the platform’s risk attitude. The results reveal that, when coupled with an appropriate government intervention policy, a regulated scenario leads to a better outcome, particularly when the MSP is risk-neutral and strikes a right balance between the EF and DF. The win–win situation may not be realized when the MSP is risk-averse and the host government is merely focused on its economic influence. To successfully promote sustainable supply chain finance (SSCF) through digital platforms, policy makers are urged to leverage their legislative power and prioritize green entrepreneurship and social welfare over their financial maximization agenda.

Building mutual trust in collaborative green NPD: Evidence from China's digital infrastructure

The increasing green NPD (new product development) efforts in Asian markets gains increasing popularity among academic research and managerial practice. Given the prevailing knowledge about NPD collaboration drawing on traditional Western culture-centric approach, this study sets up a new analytical framework and investigates the dynamic trust-building mechanisms among multiple stakeholders in the collaborative green NPD process in China's national cultural context. Based on qualitative research using a longitudinal case study of China's digital infrastructure, three distinct collaborative green NPD phases including “innovation in peripheral components, incremental innovation in core components and radical innovation in core components” are identified. Besides, summaries of trust measures among suppliers, buying firms, and regulators are presented to open the black box of the antecedences and dynamics to facilitate the understanding of the truly complex nature of trust-building. During the phased collaborative green NPD processes, the role of China's national culture including “high degrees of power distance, low degrees of individualism, low degrees of uncertainty avoidance, high degrees of long-term orientation and high degrees of masculinity” is also discussed.

How to Improve the Quality and Speed of Green New Product Development?

With the deep integration of supply chain with Internet and Internet of things, it is an important way for enterprises to win market competition and seek sustainable development to develop green new products through external green supply chain integration (GSCI). This study established a unified research framework of external GSCI, knowledge spiral (KS), green new product development (NPD), and top management’s environmental awareness (TMEA). Structural equation modeling and analytic hierarchy process are used to explore the mechanism of the established research framework. The research results of this paper are as follows: (i) Green supplier integration (SI) and green consumer integration (CI) have significant positive effects on green NPD speed (GS), green NPD quality (GQ), and KS, and KS has a significant positive effect on GS and GS, respectively. Compared with green CI, green SI has a greater impact on KS, GS, and GQ. In addition, compared with GS, KS has a greater impact on GQ; (ii) KS has a significant partial mediating effect in the relationship between green CI, GS, and GQ. Compared with GS, KS has stronger mediating effect between green CI and GQ. Compared with green SI, the equivalent KS capability is more significant in integrating green customer information; (iii) TMEA has a significant moderating effect on the relationship between KS, and GQ and has no significant moderating effect on the relationship between KS and GS. Future research will analyze the mediating effect of the four dimensions of KS in the relationship between external GSCM and the green NPD speed and green NPD quality.

Implementation of Green New Product Development Among SMEs: Barriers and Critical Success Factors

Green New Product Development (GNPD) is very important due to environmental issues increasing. GNPD is defined as creating, designing and develop ecological product which could help in protecting the environment. Small and medium enterprise (SME) firms is one of the contributor to the environmental issues but they could not afford to implement GNPD because there are several obstacles which prevent the successful of GNPD implementation. The objective of this paper are to identify the critical success factors and to determine the obstacles of GNPD implementation among SMEs. The method used in this study is conceptual review of previous literature in green and NPD area of research. The result finding of this paper consist of 9 critical success factors and 12 obstacles. All the critical success factors and obstacles will be grouped. The finding of this study could be a source and fundamental guideline for future study in developing framework for GNPD implementation especially for manufacturing SMEs in Malaysia. Besides that, the result of this study could help organization especially SMEs’s owner and manager in assessing their initiative to implement GNPD in organization.

Green New Product Development: The Pivotal Role of Product Greenness

This study aims to develop an integrative framework for green new product development (NPD) based on the existing literature and to empirically study the applicability of that integrative framework. This study answers three calls: for research that is rooted in a traditional NPD perspective, for research that integrates marketing aspects in a model of green NPD, and for research that acknowledges variations in greenness. The results from eight case studies in two industries (i.e., the chemical and food industries) substantiate the integrative framework and suggest that it provides a good basis for understanding green NPD. The study demonstrates that green NPD is not fundamentally different from traditional NPD but does contain features and underlying mechanisms that reflect the increased complexity of green NPD. The framework incorporates the targeting and positioning of green product innovations, thus establishing itself as a holistic framework. Most importantly, the study shows how greenness plays a pivotal role in tying the various elements of the framework together. The realized greenness of a new product is a central concept that helps managers understand complex relationships among industry type, green targeting, and green positioning.

Integrating Multiple Stakeholder Issues in New Product Development: An Exploration

Addressing the interests of a wide set of stakeholders is important because it may have positive effects on financial performance. At the same time, however, it is also very complex because managers may face conflicting stakeholder issues, much more so than organizations that listen to only one stakeholder. Little is known about how multiple stakeholder issues are dealt with in the context of new product development (NPD). The objective of this study is to delineate the elements of stakeholder integration in the context of NPD. A combination of insights from stakeholder theory and market information processing serves as a theoretical perspective to guide the empirical exploration in this study. The authors take the development of green (ecological) products as an empirical context for their qualitative multiple case study. Specifically, they selected four case studies with different expected levels of stakeholder integration, based on literature about green NPD. Data were collected through in‐depth interviews with key informants, collecting documents, and obtaining artifacts. In total, 28 informants from various domains were interviewed. Transcribed interviews were coded using qualitative analysis software. The results show that a distinction needs to be made between market and nonmarket stakeholders, and that not all organizations are equally capable of identifying issues that are important to both categories of stakeholders. Organizations that identify issues that are relevant to both market stakeholders and nonmarket stakeholders are more likely to face tensions between stakeholder issues in NPD. Organizations manage these tensions using several, sometimes redundant, coordination mechanisms and using multiple prioritization principles in conjunction. Based on the results, the authors conceptualize stakeholder integration capability in an NPD context as the combination of stakeholder issue identification techniques, coordination mechanisms, and prioritization principles. They propose that stakeholder integration capability is the result of a learning process. Moreover, they propose that proactivity of environmental management and environmental impact of the industry help to explain why stakeholder issue identification techniques are developed, and that the identification of more stakeholder issues leads organizations to develop coordination mechanisms and prioritization principles. Finally, the authors propose that stakeholder integration capability leads to competitive advantage through organizational identification by stakeholders. The study implies that integrating multiple stakeholder issues is not just a matter of feeding additional information into NPD processes, but of changing the nature of these NPD processes.

Green new product development and supplier involvement: strategic partnership for green innovation

Integrating environmental concerns into New Product Development (NPD) have become a strategic issue for corporate competitiveness. Despite increasing attention of green products in supply chain management, there is a gap between emerging green NPD and existing mainstream NPD literature. In attempting to bridge this gap, this study presents a case where the Korean Electronics and its key suppliers succeeded in managing environmental challenges and developing a green refrigerator through a collaborative relationship. A case study approach is used to develop a better understanding of the NPD process and the critical factors that contributed to the realisation of a green refrigerator. This study found that critical success factors for green NPD include technology and management factors, as well as cooperativeness and power balance for collaborative relationships. This paper suggests a route to practicing mutually beneficial final manufacturer-supplier relationships through green NPD activities.

Exploratory examination of whether marketers include stakeholders in the green new product development process

Many firms are attempting to make their products less environmentally harmful. However, marketers and others within the firm often have limited environmental expertise. When attempting to `green' its products, it is therefore important that the firm include a broader set of stakeholders in the green new product development (NPD) process, as this ensures that all relevant environmental issues are considered. This paper examines US and Australian marketers' perceptions of stakeholders' involvement in the green NPD process to determine whether stakeholders with this broader environmental expertise are included. It also examines the specific strategies US marketers within the study used to involve these groups in the green NPD process. It was found that the strategies used were basic in nature and some additional strategies are suggested.

Stakeholders' Contribution to the Green New Product Development Process

The intricacies of environmental issues require that marketers involve a broad set of stakeholders in the green new product development (NPD) process. These stakeholders often have information and expertise that are outside the organisation's core domain. While these stakeholders can cooperate with the firm and assist organisations in developing green products, they can also threaten the green NPD process and/or indirectly influence the firm's activities via motivating others to act. Using a sample of Australian and US marketers, this study found that both groups' perceived that a range of stakeholders could impact (i.e. cooperate, threaten, and indirectly influence) the green NPD process, although there were some differences in the samples' views. A preliminary examination of the strategies/approaches used to involve stakeholders in the green NPD process identified that marketers failed to actively include stakeholders with environmental expertise in this process. They may, therefore, be missing opportunities to more effectively green their products.

Developing green products: learning from stakeholders

The complexities of environmental issues require that when developing new green products marketers have to seek‐out, involve and learn from stakeholders with environmental expertise. These stakeholders have information that lies outside the organisation’s main area of expertise and can assist the firm in developing less environmentally harmful products. This article examines US and Australian markets’ perceptions of stake‐holders’ potential to influence the green new product development (NPD) process and what strategies can be used to involve stakeholders in this process. The findings suggest that marketers believe some stakeholders with “high” influencing abilities should be involved in the green NPD process, although it appears that in practice, firms use very basic methods to include these stakeholders. It also appears that there is limited formal interaction between the firm and its stakeholders and that respondents are not engaging and learning from others with green product expertise.