Positioning strategic competitiveness of green business innovation capabilities using hybrid method

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Abstract

There are intensive studies on the issues of environment practice and business innovation capability, have been dealt with extensively from practitioners and academicians, however, studies on the evaluation of green business innovation capabilities (GBICs) are few. This study tackles the evaluation assessment using fuzzy set theory, analytical network process and importance–performance analysis. Specifically, this study is using the theoretical framework of GBICs and proposed hybrid approach, which are new in the theoretical and empirical literatures. An expert group was empirical assessment to the perception on PWB sector and a manufacturing firm is evaluated. The analytical results indicated that this proposed hybrid method is a suitable and effective method for identifying and analyzing the strategic competitiveness of GBICs at case firm, especially when evaluation criteria are dependent in uncertainty.

Research highlights

► Firms must integrate organizational capabilities and business innovation to ensure corporate survival, namely, green business innovation capabilities. ► There is dependence relations exist in the aspects and criteria for forging green business innovation capabilities, the analytic network process analysis and importance performance analysis techniques are employed to deal with this recursive relations. ► The contribution is first to hybrid the methods into a single case study with a hierarchical framework to build a visual map and to evaluate GBICs successfully.

Introduction

Facing fluctuating environments, printed wire board (PWB) firms require continual business innovation and environment management to maintain competitive edge. Such a hybrid management concept requires firms to reorganize its organizational capacities to harmonize with the external environment. Consequently, firms must integrate organizational capabilities and business innovation to ensure corporate survival, namely, green business innovation capabilities (GBICs). The capacities engender multi-dimensional difficulties that involve numerous organizational functions and resource integration among various departments (Stone, 2006a, Tseng et al., in press, Stone, 2006b). As the GBICs related firms’ activities have inherent and highly uncertainty and imprecision, business innovation processes are uncertain and unpredictable, and difficult to assess accurately. Moreover, it is important to know what capabilities influence to achieve greater firms’ performance. However, academic studies are unclear on the critical success factors of developing GBICs. Literatures for continuous study address the aggregate impact and benefits of environmentally responsive actions (Buchholz and Marcus, 1995, Guimaraes and Liska, 1995).

In recent years, though it is widely accepted that in order to address the sustainable development challenge, firms need to balance financial, social and environmental performance (Elkington, 1998). Firms must do their best in GBICs to strengthen their competitiveness due to the situation of ever-changing green technology and short life cycle of electronic products. Unfortunately, GBICs involves high uncertainty and risk and many resources are consumed in the process. Hence, understanding GBICs is a feasible way for firms to acquire the necessary techniques and assistance though this study. Although the GBICs have been adopted by firms for years and there are different aspects of collaboration (Perdomo-Ortiz et al., 2006, Tseng, in press-b, Tseng et al., 2008a). The literatures are regarding to research and development on production processes, new products and new services (Conway and Steward, 1998, Pujari, 2006, Pujari et al., 2004, Pujari et al., 2003). Hence, the top managers of a firm may keep multiple aspects and criteria for forging GBICs but with different priorities in mind, thus positioning the weighting on aspects and criteria for evaluating the suitability. On the other hand, the way of setting weights on aspects and criteria also reveals the priority of the resources distribution. However, the relative weights set for the aspects and criteria are dependence with each others in a firm.

Since there is dependence relations exist in the aspects and criteria for forging GBICs, the analytic network process (ANP) analysis technique is employed to deal with this recursive relations. This method has been applied in Sarkis and Talluri (2002) showed how the ANP model combined with another optimization model could be employed to conduct a comprehensive evaluation of the factors affecting the job location at a digital equipment corporation. Yurdakul (2004) provided a multi-criteria performance measurement model using ANP that addressed the competitive strategies and interdependence between attributes to measure a manufacturing firm’s performance. Tseng, Wu, Lin, and Liao (2008b) identify some of the critical decision criteria in environmental practices as an efficient system to prioritize competitive advantage. Fuzzy ANP is the based methodology to tackle the multi-criteria in the selection of competitive priorities based on current business scenario. Tseng, Chiang, and Lan (2009b) proposed a novel hierarchical evaluation framework to assist the expert group to select the optimal supplier in supply chain management strategy using ANP technique that can simultaneously take into account the relationships of feedback and dependence of criteria, and a non-additive fuzzy integral that can eliminate the interactivity of expert subjective judgment problems. However, the objectives are to explore the relative importance of aspects and criteria that influence the GBICs and to evaluate the competitiveness in Taiwan or even to the world market. This method is wide applied in many industrial fields. However, to position the aspects and criteria and draw the managerial implications, the importance–performance analysis (IPA) is conducted for case firm as well as for the perception on industry as a whole (Martilla & James, 1977).

IPA provides a useful and easily understandable guide for identifying the most crucial aspects and criteria in terms of their need for managerial action, as a means to develop successful marketing programs to achieve advantage over rivals. This study makes a significant academic and managerial contribution to the debate on the business case for environmental sustainability on innovation capability. As mentioned earlier, relatively few studies to date have looked empirically into the impact or performance of firm’s GBICs (Pujari and Wright, 1996, Pujari and Wright, 1999, Pujari et al., 2003, Pujari et al., 2004). The objectives of this study are to conduct an empirical study on GBICs in case PWB firm in Taiwan to identify the critical success factors leading to better performance. GBICs is defined as a green business innovation process wherein firm explicitly undertake capabilities to achieve higher green performance as well as commercial performance. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents the proposed approach. Section 3 subsequently applies the proposed approach to evaluating a case firm. This is followed by Section 4 is study results, managerial implications in Section 5 and conclusions in Section 6.

Section snippets

Hierarchical framework of GBIC

A proposed evaluation framework presented with seven primary dependence aspects and 25 criteria to be evaluated for this study. The seven criteria are green planning and commitment of the management capability (AS1), behavior and integration capability (AS2), green innovative projects capability (AS3), green knowledge and skills capability (AS4), green Information and communication capability (AS5), external environment capability (AS6) and green operations capability (AS7) (Perdomo-Ortiz et

Research method

To determine the strategic competitiveness of GBICs, evaluation criteria are multiple and frequently structured into multi-level hierarchies. Decision-making is the process of defining the decision objectives, gathering relevant information, and composes the strategic map for the result. Hence, the first phase is to define the decision objectives-here is to evaluate the firm in GBICs with linguistics preferences. After defining the decision objectives, it is required to generate and establish

Results

To operationalize evaluation proposed hybrid method of the aspects and criteria, which is relatively important to the PWB sector. There are reasons, first, the case firm continues to improve GBICs and face challenge to how they manage the GBICs in the competitive market. Second, case firms have to sustain reform the GBICs in the sector in order to deal with market competition and customer green requirements. The expert perceptions are obtained from the industrial and academic expert group with

Managerial implications

This result reveals the importance and application of the seven aspects. Specifically, the development and usage of green information and communication capability, external environment capability and green operations capability should be concentrated. However, this is particularly crucial for the case firm that focuses on its GBICs Goal. The key managerial implications of this study emphasize some issues.

First, as the result, there is a need to probe firm’s goal with the external environment.

Concluding remarks

The proposed model incorporates hierarchical aspects and criteria structure, fuzzy set theory, ANP and IPA, comprise an effective weighting of firms from subjective. This method is also useful for evaluating final decision making of the case firm. This proposed approach can easily and effectively accommodate that aspects and criteria are not independent. This result is involving the dependence relations and uncertainty. In particular, the IPA to draw the strategic map from the evaluation of

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