Environmental innovation inertia: Analyzing the business circumstances for environmental process and product innovations

We categorize the environmental innovations used in the environmental management and innovation management literature into two types: environmental process and product innovations. By using objective measurements of internal and external business circumstances from a large-scale survey of manufacturing firms in Korea, we investigate whether firms delay adoption of specific environmental innovations and if so how to overcome the passive nature of environmental innovation activities. The main findings are as follows. Both low operational performance and high export intensity are likely to lead to environmental process innovations. On the contrary, they do not play a significant role in increasing environmental product innovations. Instead, environmental product innovations take place under normative pressure. These results contribute to the “it pays to be green” and true sustainability discussion by examining the business environmental fit of a focal firm—either with environmental process innovations or with environmental product innovations.