How can green innovation from manufacturers benefit from supplier networks?

Prior research on supply chain management has advanced substantially our understanding of how suppliers’ knowledge affects manufacturers’ green innovation. However, overlooking the suppliers’ diverse green knowledge in supplier networks, namely, green knowledge diversity, has limited our understanding of both supply chain management and green innovation development. To address this important issue, this study aims to rely on social network theory as the overarching framework and knowledge-based view as the underlying theoretical foundation to examine how green knowledge diversity contributes to manufacturers’ green innovation performance, while considering three types of supplier network properties (network strength, network heterogeneity and network density).

This study collects both survey and secondary proxy data from 209 manufacturing firms over three time periods (mid-2018, mid-2019 and mid-2020). PROCESS macro is applied to test the research hypotheses.

The results provide compelling evidence that green knowledge management processes partially mediate the effect of green knowledge diversity on manufacturers’ green innovation performance. The effect of green knowledge diversity is strengthened by supplier network strength and supplier network heterogeneity, but hindered by supplier network density.

This study provides a practical guide to help manufacturers enhance green innovation performance by properly managing and leveraging their suppliers’ diverse green knowledge domains in supplier networks.

This study contributes to the supply chain management and green innovation literature by offering novel theoretical and empirical insights into how manufacturers can use their supplier networks to strengthen green innovation.