The relationship between sustainable innovation and product or service innovation: a survey in companies in Rio Grande do Sul.
| Autor | Severo, Eliana Andrea |
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Introduction
Innovation is regarded as a prime source for companies to remain in the market, enabling competitive advantage, economic development and changes in society. Companies maintain competitive advantage not just with a single innovation, but by a concatenation of innovations over time (Schumpeter, 1934; Calantone, Garcia & Droge, 2003). In this context, it is relevant to categorize the dimensions of innovation, as product or process as it has relation with the strategy that a company adopts to meet the demand and market opportunities, capitalizing on the capacity and organizational competence. The system integration, extensive networks, flexible and personalized response also the continuous innovation will enable greater financial performance, which in turn will be more extensive if the products or the input processes are adopted early and quickly and if there is interrelationship between the two of them (Gopalakrishnan, 2000; Tidd, 2006; Xin, Yeung, & Cheng, 2010; Prajogo, 2016).
Long-term investments, the development of processes and organizational skills are needed to translate scientific and technological opportunities in new successful products and services, which are widely adopted and supported, an equal and sometimes greater, emphasis is needed concerning the outputs of the process innovation, more specifically the diffusion and adoption of process innovation (Tidd, 2006). Furthermore, innovation must be seen not only as a competitive advantage conquest strategy but also as a maintaining strategy (Tidd, 2001).
In this scenario, innovation is a significant driver of different types of organizational performance (Vincent, Bharadwaj & Challagalla, 2004). Although the idea of innovation is directly linked to technology, the concept can have different meanings based on contextual variables and understanding these innovation factors is critical to the development and dissemination of future technologies (Baskaran & Mehta, 2016). To address this issue, the dissemination of technological and organizational innovation might be oriented to improve people's quality of life, in addition to developing strategic and economically viable innovations, innovation can currently be seen as a latent need to undertake environmental and social issues and contemplate current and future needs (De Medeiros, Ribeiro & Cortimiglia, 2014; Franceschini, Faria & Jurowetzki, 2016). According to Hansen, Grosse-Dunker and Reichwald (2009), corporations increasingly subscribe to the principles of corporate sustainability, which is generally described as the integration of economic, environmental and social dimensions.
Systems integration and extensive networks, flexible and personalized response and continuous innovation will enable greater financial performance, which in turn, will be more extensive if the products or processes are introduced early and adopted quickly (Gopalakrishnan, 2000). In line with this, it is necessary for companies to develop a holistic understanding of innovation and their importance and impact on environmental sustainability, a suitable environmental management can also provide a competitive opportunity impacting the community (Gonzalez-Benito & Gonzalez-Benito, 2006; Van Den Heiligenberg, Heimeriks, Hekkert & Van Oort, 2017).
There is a noticeable increase in society environmental awareness; however, there are still significant changes to be done so that businesses can be more environmentally efficient, aiming at cleaner production and efficiency of resources that end up reflecting on generating income and benefits for business and society (Khalili & Duecker, 2013; Luken, Van Berkel, Leuenberger, & Schwager, 2016; Bolis, Morioka, & Sznelwar, 2017). Environmental sustainability is positively related to the reduction of inputs used in production, increased reuse and recycling, as well as increased productivity and, consequently, increased competitiveness and improved organizational performance; while improving environmental and financial performance (Paulraj, 2011; Dowell & Muthulingam, 2017; Severo, Dorion & Guimaraes, 2017a; Liu, Zhu & Seuring, 2017).
To explore this issue, the research question is translated as: what is the importance of sustainable innovation in product innovation and services? Coherently, this study aims to examine the importance of sustainable innovation on products and services innovation, in companies in the northern region of Rio Grande do Sul state (Brazil). In addition to this introduction, the article presents the theoretical inherent in innovation and sustainable innovation; methodology; results and discussions and conclusions.
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Conceptual framework
2.1 Innovation
Innovation is seen as a prime source for companies to remain in the market, enabling competitive advantage, economic development and many changes in the society; thus constituting a process involving situations and determinations of new developments, as well as the inclusion of derived knowledge tools, artifacts and mechanisms by which people are integrated into the environment (Schumpeter, 1934; Garcia & Calantone, 2002; Calantone, Garcia & Droge, 2003). In this context, Schumpeter (1934) introduced the concept of creative destruction by which innovation cycles shape economic and competitive landscapes, providing an explanation of why some firms outperform others; its definition of innovation is characterized as new combinations covering five cases: the introduction of a new good or a new quality; the introduction of a new production method; the opening of a new market; the conquest of a new source of supply of raw materials and the realization of the new organization of any industry, like the creation or the breaking of a monopoly position.
With the company restructuration intangible assets can be considered those hardly imitated or replaced by competitors, among them the innovative capacity of a company, they have been identified as the source of competitive advantage of successful companies (Brito, Brito & Morganti, 2009). Thus, the role of innovation can be seen as essential in the pursuit of higher corporate performance and as an organizational activity that is inherently beneficial (Gopalakrishnan, 2000; Dosi, 1990). Companies maintain competitive advantages not just by a single innovation, but by a concatenation of innovations over time, and it must be perceived as a process that involves initial failures, recycling between stages, dead ends and jumps out of sequence, demonstrating that it should not be considered as a linear model (Calantone, Garcia & Droge, 2003; Tidd, 2006).
Innovation can occur in two basic forms: (1) product innovation, which are basically changes in the products or services offered by an organization, such as the development or use of new components, features and technologies to produce new products and (2) innovation processes, which can be considered as changes in the ways products and services are created and delivered, as well as the improvement of production processes technologies necessary to produce a certain product (Tidd, 2001; Prajogo, 2016; De Guimaraes, Severo, Dorion, Coallier & Olea, 2016). In this context, innovation can then be a new product or service, a new structure or administrative system, a new technological process in production, a new plan or a program related to the members of the organization (Damanpour, 1991). According to the Oslo Manual (OECD, 2005) and Bessant and Tidd (2007), innovation is characterized as a kind of change that introduces new organizational practices and falls into four categories: (1) innovation of products and/or services; (2) process innovation; (3) management (organizational) innovation and (4) marketing innovation (competitive position).
In practice innovation of products or services, usually occur together, product innovations often lead to innovations in their production process and vice versa; however, this synergy does not always occur, both can also be interdependent, which adds complexity to the relationship innovation performance (Tidd, Bessant & Pavitt, 1997; Tidd, 2001).
Prajogo (2016) points out that the categorization of the dimensions of innovation (product or process) is important because it is related to the strategy that a company adopts to meet the demand and market opportunities, capitalizing on the ability and organizational skills and impacting company' performance. Product innovation can improve sales because it has better performance and reliability or durability, better features such as integrated facilities or aesthetics compared to existing products offered by competitors in the market, thus an important aspect of competitive advantage of innovation product is that customers can clearly perceive the values, which can lead them to the purchase decision (Prajogo, 2016; Xin, Yeung & Cheng, 2010).
Coherently, product (Sarpong & Maclean, 2012; Zhang, Qi, Wang, Zhao & Pawar, 2019) and process innovations (Linder & Sperber, 2019) have a direct impact on the organization. According to Zhang, Qi, Wang, Zhao and Pawar (2019), business and political ties improve the performance of product innovation, as well as the influences of cultural and institutional environments, provide insights on how to use business and the political ties of managers to product innovation in China and India. However, Sarpong and Maclean (2012) demonstrate that vision incongruence on the part of different stakeholders regarding the future innovation may impede the generation of a shared interpretation of the future, and hence the subsequent capture of value.
According to Najafi-Tavani, Najafi-Tavani, Naude, Oghazi and Zeynaloo (2018), in the presence of absorptive capacity, only collaboration with research organizations and competitors have a positive effect on product innovation capability. In the case of process innovation capability, collaboration with research organizations and suppliers are the most important factors.
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