Are innovation resources and capabilities enough to make businesses sustainable? An empirical study of leading sustainable innovative firms

Increasingly, innovations aimed at sustainable development have occupied a top position in businesses’ planning. Thus, this paper is aimed at contributing to the ongoing and current debate on sustainability-oriented innovation (SOI) development. Despite SOI’s ability to bring forward new opportunities for companies, it is accompanied by increased complexity, which, in turn, may require adjustments to innovation resources and capabilities to address the challenges that arise. Starting from a conceptual framework of requisite resources and capabilities for innovations, we test these resources and capabilities empirically in five leading SOI firms. The results show that innovative SOI firms need to strengthen their exploration and exploitation capabilities, including unifying the incorporation of internal and external resources with a clear orientation. In that sense, these adjustments are hypothesised to be more important than R&D expenditures, symbolic capital growth and knowledge formalisation.