Environmental Orientation And Competitive Advantage:the Intermediary Role Of Green Innovation

Enterprise environmental managemental is playing an increasingly important role in today's business field.This strategic environment integration provides opportunities for enterprises to implement green innovation and also brings great challenges.At the same time,in the face of external environmental regulations,market environmental protection requirements and competition in the industry's environmental practices,companies are forced or more proactive to allocate resources to implement some green response activities,in order to reduce the waste of resources and environmental pollution,while gaining a competitive position in the domestic industry and even in the international market.Therefore,from the perspective of natural resources,we demonstrate the impact of internal and external environmental orientation of manufacturing enterprises on the acquisition of competitive advantage,and the intermediary role of green innovation in the above relationship.Exploring in detail the direct and indirect links between environmental orientation,green innovation(green management innovation,green product innovation and green process innovation),environmental performance and competitive advantage;studing the impact of different types of environmental orientations on the implementation of three different green inovations;verifing the influence of the improvement of enterprises' environmental orientation level on improving their environmental performance;and probing into how-environmental orientation affects green competitive advantage.In addition,on the basis of paying attention to the dualistic correlation between environmental orientation and performance,the paper studies the important practice of environmental protection management-green innovation,which acts as the intermediary of the influence of environmental orientation on corporate performance.Based on the empirical analysis of 297 valid sample data,the following conclusions are drawn:environmental orientation is positively correlated with green innovation,green innovation positively affects competitive advantage;environmental orientation can bring competitive advantage,and more importantly,the findings support the mediating effects of green products,process and management innovations help to better enhance the competitive acdvantage of the company.That is,the unique effect between green innovation and environmental orientation leads to a better competitive advantage than the direct impact between environmental orientation and competitive advantage.However,ythe results only support two assumptions in the causal relationship between the three dirmensions of green inovation(green product innovation(H6a),green process innovation(H6b),green management innovation(H6c))and competitive acdvantage.The path coefficient between green management innovation and competitive advantage is not significant,assaming H6c fails verification.This means that green management innovation is not as effective as green product and process innovation to directly help manufacturing companies gain a competitive advantage That is to say,green management innovation can not bring immediate competitive advantages to enterprises.Therefore,top management should focus on green product and process innovation because there is a stronger link between green procduct and process innovation and competitive advantage.