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Keywords

institutional pressure, technical capabilities, redundant resource, green innovation

Abstract

Under the background of the “Double Carbon” strategic goal and the new era of green development, how to deal with the institutional pressure to achieve the sustainable development of enterprise economic benefits and environmental protection has become an important research issue. In the previous literature on institutional pressure and green innovation, scholars have analyzed the impact from the perspectives of corporate legitimacy, environmental attitude and resource arrangement. However, under the guidance of the “14th Five-Year Plan”, can technological capabilities, as a practice for enterprises to cope with institutional pressures, help enterprises pursue a “winwin” of economic and environmental benefits? It is an important way for enterprises to implement green innovation, but few studies have studied it as a bridge between institutional pressure and enterprise green innovation. According to the resource-based view, enterprises can rely on their organizational resources and capabilities to continuously develop and apply the latest technologies to meet the needs of integrating more green elements into products or processes by enhancing their technological capabilities, which meets the requirements of the institutional environment for the legitimacy of enterprises and helps enterprises to achieve ‘win-win’ economic and environmental benefits. Therefore, technological capability may play a role in the transmission between institutional pressure and green innovation. Therefore, this study aims to explore the relationship among institutional pressure, green innovation and technological capability, and tries to verify the moderating effect of slack resources between technological capability and green innovation. Based on the institutional theory and resource-based theory, this study selected 207 manufacturing enterprises as research samples, and used multiple regression analysis to study the relationship between institutional pressure and corporate green innovation, and discussed the mediating role of technological capabilities and the moderating role of redundant resources. The results show that: first, regulatory pressure, normative pressure and imitation pressure have a significant positive impact on green innovation; secondly, technical ability plays a partial mediating role between regulatory pressure, normative pressure, imitation pressure and green innovation. Finally, different types of slack resources play different regulatory roles between technological capability and green innovation. The main contributions of this study are as follows. First of all, it supplements the research between institutional pressure and corporate green innovation. The conclusion of this paper echoes the views of previous researchers. On the one hand, the research has deepened the understanding of the relationship between corporate green innovation through empirical tests; on the other hand, it expands the theoretical space of institutional pressure and enterprise green innovation; secondly, this paper takes technical ability as a ‘ bridge’ to empirically test whether technical ability plays an intermediary role between institutional pressure and green innovation. It reveals the improvement of technical ability level brought by institutional pressure, makes up for the limitations of the current research on how institutional pressure affects the transmission mechanism of enterprise green innovation, and provides new insights for enterprises to implement green innovation. Finally, according to the resource-based theory, the redundant resources are included in the research framework, and the moderating role of redundant resources in the relationship between technological capability and green innovation is theoretically analyzed and tested. It expands the research boundary of resource-based theory and provides practical guidance for promoting green innovation of enterprises. Based on the results of empirical research, this paper puts forward the corresponding management enlightenment. First, enterprises need to pay close attention to changes in the institutional environment, achieve green core competitiveness and sustainable development by improving technical capabilities and establishing partnerships with other enterprises, and flexibly use creative resource, and use strategies to meet the resource needs of green innovation. Second, the government should strengthen the control and guidance of enterprises by improving the level of regulations and supervision, and at the same time implement long-term incentive measures to cultivate consumers ‘green environmental protection values’, so as to promote enterprises to adopt technological innovation behavior to improve the level of green innovation and promote sustainable development. Third, industry associations should guide enterprises to adopt advanced green technology, promote the whole industry to carry out collective green innovation, drive the whole industry to carry out green innovation through the practice of leading enterprises, and form a good green environment atmosphere, culture and market environment.

DOI

10.16315/j.stm.2023.05.002

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