What drives sustainability focus in firm innovation?

Sustainable development is a grand challenge of the current era, making sustainable innovation a top strategic priority for many firms. Although research has examined various business outcomes of sustainability, little is known on how firms could cultivate a higher level of sustainability focus in their innovation endeavors.

In Sustainability-focused innovation in the business-to-business context: Antecedents and managerial implications, a paper forthcoming in the Journal of Business Research, Shuili Du, Ludwig Bstieler, and Goksel Yalcinkaya develop and empirically test a model of key antecedents to sustainability-focused innovation in business-to-business firms. The study finds that global focus and open innovation are positively associated with greater sustainability focus and that the effect of open innovation is more positive when the firm adopts a proactive innovation strategy; however, open innovation is a double-edged sword in the sense that an over reliance on open innovation could be detrimental to the firm's sustainability focus.