Overcoming obstacles to innovation: can environmental management practices help?

ABSTRACT

Whereas the previous research on environmental management practices explores their relationship with innovation performance, this paper investigates whether those practices can help firms to overcome obstacles to innovation. More precisely, the purpose of this article is to empirically investigate the relationship between environmental management practices and three types of innovation obstacles: cost, knowledge and market obstacles. By using three databases on a sample of French manufacturing firms, our findings demonstrate that the adoption of environmental management practices significantly reduces cost and knowledge obstacles to innovation but has no significant effect on market obstacles. Therefore, this study advances research on innovation performance improvement by unveiling that the adoption of environmental management practices can serve as a mechanism for breaking through innovation obstacles.

KEYWORDS:

• Environmental management practices
• innovation performance
• obstacles to innovation
• empirical analysis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. OECD (2018, pp. 32) defines innovation as “a new or improved product or process (or combination thereof) that differs significantly from the unit’s previous products or processes and that has been made available to potential users (product) or brought into use by the unit (process)”.