Businesses increasingly incorporate the sustainability aspects into their products, services, and processes that drive innovation. While extant research on the linkage between sustainability and innovation has gained momentum over the past years, prior research has predominantly focused on sustainability's performance impacts (e.g., financially and environmentally) and product innovation outputs, neglecting the internal mechanisms that leverage sustainability. While findings from previous studies suggest that sustainability may drive business model innovation (BMI), it still lacks empirical evidence on whether and how sustainability may influence the evolvement of BMI. Relying on the stimulus‐organism‐response framework, we address these shortcomings and argue that sustainability commitment influences certain strategic orientations that increase the propensity of innovating a business model (BM). Using a sample of 167 German manufacturing firms, we empirically investigate these relationships. Our results from structural equation modeling show that the sustainability commitment has no direct effect on BMIs. Our mediation analysis does, however, reveal that sustainability commitment has complex indirect effects driving BMI through strategic orientations, namely the firm's market, technology, and entrepreneurial orientation. By uncovering the mechanisms through which sustainability commitment drives BMI, our findings provide new impetus on BMI’s internal drivers and highlight the important role of certain strategic behaviors that guide managers’ strategic choices when planning to innovate a BM. From a managerial perspective, our findings thus provide mangers with guidelines to achieve the right configuration of strategic orientations when responding to sustainability issues by innovating their current BM.

中文翻译：

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促进业务模型创新：可持续性的影响和战略方向的中介作用

企业越来越多地将可持续性方面纳入其驱动创新的产品，服务和流程中。尽管在过去几年中，有关可持续性与创新之间联系的现有研究获得了发展势头，但先前的研究主要侧重于可持续性对绩效的影响（例如，在财务和环境方面）和产品创新输出，而忽略了利用可持续性的内部机制。尽管先前研究的结果表明，可持续性可能会推动业务模型创新（BMI），但它仍然缺乏关于可持续性是否以及如何影响BMI演变的经验证据。依靠刺激－生物－反应框架，我们解决了这些缺点，并认为可持续发展承诺会影响某些战略方向，从而增加了创新业务模型（BM）的倾向。我们以167家德国制造公司为样本，对这些关系进行了实证研究。我们从结构方程建模得出的结果表明，可持续性承诺对BMI没有直接影响。但是，我们的中介分析确实表明，可持续发展承诺具有复杂的间接影响，从而通过战略方向（即公司的市场，技术和创业方向）推动BMI的发展。通过发现可持续发展承诺推动BMI的机制，我们的发现为BMI的内部驱动力提供了新的动力，并突出了某些战略行为的重要作用，这些战略行为在计划创新BM时指导经理的战略选择。从管理的角度来看，我们的发现因此为管理人员提供了指导方针，以通过创新其现有的BM解决可持续性问题时实现正确的战略方向配置。