Confronting the grand challenge of environmental sustainability within supply chains: how can organizational strategic agility drive environmental innovation?

Abstract

The environmental sustainability of interconnected, globally-distributed, and complex supply chains – and the dependency of human civilization on them – remains a grand challenge for organizations, nations, and communities across the globe. In this study, we draw theoretically on the natural-resource-based view (NRBV) and the emerging stakeholder-resource-based view (SRBV) and report empirical findings from a dataset encompassing 758 managers from 185 firms in the emerging economy setting of Turkey. Our data reveal that the organizational strategic agility of focal firms that is enacted through organic organizational structures and regional innovation initiatives enables these agile firms to generate collaborative environmental innovation with their supply partners and attain greater environmental sustainability. This paper contributes to the emerging literature on grand challenges, organizational strategic agility, and innovation management by explicating that for-profit firms can leverage their organizational strategic agility to address the grand challenge of environmental sustainability in supply chains, thereby unveiling the circumstances that allow them to do so. Our implications point to two interventions that can propel environmental innovation among supply partners to wider regional and global social and environmental benefit: a focus on organizational strategic agility and compatible organic organizational structure within firms; and a focus on generating outside regional innovation initiatives to channel agile firms to innovate collaboratively for environmental sustainability with their supply partners.

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