The prosocial-motivated process of meaningful innovation: evidence from Chinese start-ups in digital industry

Guannan Qu, Jin Chen, Yuan Jie, Luyao Wang and Dong Guo

Asia Pacific Business Review, 2023, vol. 29, issue 4, 913-930

Abstract: With the increasing prominence of SDGs, the prosocial issues of firms’ innovation activities are gaining more attention. Nevertheless, the micro-foundation of the prosocial innovation process remains unexplored. To fill this gap, we introduce the meaningful innovation (MI) framework in order to develop a moderated mediation model for investigating the prosocial motivated innovation process. By conducting an empirical analysis based on a three-wave survey of 24 small high-tech new ventures in China’s digital industry, we find that (1) as an essential source of external meaning, an employee’s prosocial motivation is positively related to a firm’s innovation performance; (2) employees’ creativity mediates the positive relationship between prosocial motivation and firms’ innovation performance; and (3) although intrinsic motivation does not significantly moderate the above mediation effect, it is positively related to firms’ innovation performance; employees’ creativity also mediates this relationship. This paper contributes to the literature on ‘social value and innovation’ studies by revealing a prosocial-motivated innovation process and ascertaining the micro-foundation of the meaningful innovation framework.

Date: 2023
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DOI: 10.1080/13602381.2023.2223831

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