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Keywords

network embeddedness; green innovation; green resource acquisition; green resource integration; executives�� environmental cognition

Abstract

Green innovation is an important way for enterprises to realize sustainable development and improve economic performance. Exploring the driving factors of green innovation is of great significance. Green innovation is the sum of a series of innovative activities carried out by enterprises around green products and processes, which can create environmental benefits and improve corporate performance, including new measures in pollution prevention, resource conservation, waste recycling and utilization, etc. It introduces ecological ideas into technological innovative activities and has the characteristics of systematic complexity and high situational dependence. Embedding in an external cooperation networks to obtain various innovative resources and enhance self-innovation ability has become an important way to successfully carry out green innovation. At present, scholars mainly focus on the effect of external environmental pressure, ignoring the impact of social cooperation network. Based on the perspective of dynamic resource management, this paper explores the impact of external network embeddedness on green innovation, and investigates the mediating effect of green resource acquisition and green resource integration between them. And it also discusses the regulating effect of executives’ environmental cognition. Based on the questionnaire data of manufacturing enterprises, this paper uses the method of multiple regression analysis to test the hypotheses. The results show that structural embeddedness and relational embeddedness play a significant positive role in promoting green innovation. And green resource acquisition and green resource integration play an intermediary role between network embeddedness and green innovation respectively. Executives’ environmental cognition positively moderates the relationship between green resource acquisition, green resource integration and green innovation. The main contributions of this paper are as follows. Firstly, this paper expands the analysis boundary of green innovation by constructing a theoretical model of network embeddedness on green innovative behavior. In the era of the knowledge economy, structural embeddedness and relational embeddedness play a significant positive role in promoting green innovative behavior. Enterprises should make extensive contact with outside organizations, strive to occupy a favorable position in the social network, and establish reciprocal cooperating relations with partners. These are helpful for enterprises to obtain high-quality scarce resources, stimulate innovative thinking and carry out green innovation. Secondly, this paper explores the intermediary effect of green resource acquisition and green resource integration between network embeddedness and green innovation. It complements and perfects the existing research results of network theory. Structural embeddedness and relational embeddedness are important ways and sources to improve the ability of green resources acquisition and integration. They can create opportunities and conditions for enterprises to search, obtain, allocate and reorganize green resources, which is beneficial to adopting new environmental technologies and products. Thirdly, this paper clarifies the boundary of the influence of green resource acquisition and green resource integration on green innovation of enterprises. Situational variables are important factors in organizational strategic behavior decision-making. The research shows that executives�� environmental cognition positively moderates the relationship between green resource acquisition, green resource integration and green innovation. It further expands the breadth and depth of the theoretical research of dynamic ability. In conclusion, the findings open the black box of internal mechanism of network embeddedness on green innovation behavior decision-making, and enriches the existing research results of green innovation.

DOI

10.16315/j.stm.2024.03.003

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