External knowledge sources, green innovation and performance

Wissal Ben Arfi, Lubica Hikkerova and Jean-Michel Sahut

Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 2018, vol. 129, issue C, 210-220

Abstract: Theoretically speaking knowledge sharing seems relevant for innovations in general. Yet, there is no adequate understanding of how knowledge sharing can develop green innovation in SMEs. This paper focuses on how internal and external knowledge sharing intercede green innovation and ponders on how it affects the organization performance. First, the empirical results show that all types of external knowledge don't convey the same green innovative outputs. Second, they reveal that the success of the innovation process is strongly impacted by the access to knowledge sources but above all by the combination of internal and external knowledge in each phase of the green innovation process. The success of green innovations unveils the organizational absorptive capacity of external knowledge and their transformation into internal skills. Eventually, the risks associated with knowledge transfer can hinder the positive relationship between green innovation and the firms' performance. It also leads to the financial failure of green innovations.

Keywords: Knowledge sharing; Green innovation; Absorptive capacity; Performance; SME (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (144)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0040162517312349
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:tefoso:v:129:y:2018:i:c:p:210-220

DOI: 10.1016/j.techfore.2017.09.017

Access Statistics for this article

Technological Forecasting and Social Change is currently edited by Fred Phillips

More articles in Technological Forecasting and Social Change from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu (repec@elsevier.com).