آیا نوآوری های زیست محیطی در کارایی بالا تغییرات سازمانی تعبیه شده است؟ نقش مدیریت منابع انسانی و کمال در استراتژی های کسب و کار سبز

This paper investigates whether firms’ joint implementation of organisational innovation and training may foster their adoption of environmental innovation (EI), and if this correlation falls within Porter Hypothesis (PH) framework. We study the relationship of complementarity between strategies of High Performance Work Practices (HPWP) and Human Resource Management (HRM) when EI adoption is the firms’ objective, using an original dataset on 555 Italian industrial firms regarding EI, HPWP and HRM, coherent with the last CIS2006-2008 survey. Results show that sector specificity matter. The only case in which strict complementarity is observed in organisational change concerns CO2 abatement, a relatively complex type of EI, but this is true only when the sample is restricted to more polluting (and regulated) sectors. This evidence is coherent with the Porter hypothesis: complementarity-related adoption of EI is an element of organisational change in firms that are subject to more stringent environmental regulations. Nevertheless, the fact that strict complementarity is not a diffuse factor behind the adoption of all environmental innovation indeed does not come as a surprise. At this stage in the development of green strategies, the share of eco-firms is still limited, even in advanced countries that are seeking tools for a new competitiveness. The full integration of EIs within the internal capabilities and firm's own assets is far from being reached, even in advanced and competitive industrial settings.

Do firms’ actions in organisation and training foster the adoption of environmental innovation? Are environmental strategies integrated with organisational changes aimed at increasing firms’ performances? These questions, which revolve around the issue of environmental innovation adoption, relate to an exhaustive definition of Environmental Innovation (EI).1 In the MEI (Measuring EI) research project (Kemp and Pearson, 2007 and Kemp, 2010), EI is defined as “the production, assimilation or exploitation of a product, production process, service or management or business method that is novel to the organisation (developing or adopting it) and which results, throughout its life cycle, in a reduction of environmental risk, pollution and other negative impacts of resources use (including energy use) compared to relevant alternatives”2 (Kemp, 2010, p. 2). The definition of EI is not limited to specific technologies; it also includes new organisational methods, products, services and knowledge-oriented innovations. Organisational methods are also closely linked to education and training and then to human capital formation within firms. It is worth spending some words on the definition of organisational changes as we intend them here. The literature often adopts the term High Performance Workplace Practices (HPWP),3 to define a set of organisational changes which can be thought of as drivers of superior innovative or economic performances in the firm. Coupled with this set of practices that are related to changes in production organisation (e.g. autonomous or semi-autonomous teams, quality circles) and labour organisation (e.g. job rotation, multitasking, increased workers’ responsibility), we take into account Human Resource Management (HRM) practices which are linked to the training activity sphere. The human capital embodied in employees becomes a fundamental resource since “innovating organisation benefits from a strong skill-base” (Leiponen, 2005, p. 304), which is able to sustain and to direct absorptive capacity. The importance of training activities4 that help generate and accumulate skills and competencies complementary to HPWP becomes clear. HPWP and HRM practices, as intended here, are intertwined firm's components, which, in a process of co-evolution and adaptation (Van den Bergh and Stagl, 2003), influence each other and impact the firm's innovative performance. Indeed, when a firm undergoes organisational changes such as the introduction of HPWP, the employees can be asked to learn how to manage and how to behave in a new organisational environment. Reconfiguring the organisational system in a way that increases workforce involvement and skill base, through the implementation of complementary HPWP/HRM practices, may be functional to the creation of an environment that smoothly absorbs and exploits even more complex types of innovation. The potential relationship between HPWP/HRM and EIs is focused on as a core issue by the scholars examining the development of the well-known Porter Hypothesis (PH) (Ambec and Barla, 2006, Ambec and Lanoie, 2008, Ambec et al., 2010, Jaffe et al., 1995 and Jaffe and Palmer, 1997). Some recent studies have tried to shed light on this issue in EI-related literature. Among others, we can quote Cole et al. (2008) and Bloom et al. (2010). The first assesses the role of foreign derived training on a sample of African firms’ environmental performances, finding that foreign training of a firm's decision maker, not foreign ownership per se, does reduce fuel use. Bloom et al. (2010), instead, survey UK manufacturing firms to assess whether energy efficiency performance is influenced by various forms of HPWP and find mixed evidence: more general proxies of human capital management do not have an impact, while some others seem to decrease energy use. Various other papers find a positive effect of training on EI performances (Horbach, 2008, Horbach et al., 2011 and Cainelli et al., 2011). Further, Kesidou and Demirel (2012) show for a sample of UK firms that organisational factors are important in determining eco innovation investment. Horbach et al. (2012) stress how organisational capabilities, among several other factors, have to be included among the determinants of eco innovation. Notwithstanding the above, integration of environmental innovation studies and the stream of organisational change research is far from being fully satisfactory: research windows are open. In particular, we are not aware of studies that investigate the role of the HPWP/HRM couple in the specific theme of EI adoption5 (Rennings, 2000). The aim of the paper is to investigate these somewhat unexplored issues. We scrutinise whether firms’ HPWP and HRM integrated strategies can foster the adoption of EIs. More precisely, our main research focus is to examine if a relationship of complementarity exists among these practices when the adoption of EIs is the objective. We embed this analysis within the Porter Hypothesis framework. We test complementarity between strategies for all manufacturing firms and for the sub-sample of more polluting and consequentially more heavily regulated firms. We believe that a full integration of EI in firms innovation strategies is possible and needed to evolve EI from ‘green washing’ or ‘ancillary’ strategies into a key issue in firms’ redefinition of competitive advantages. Fostering green innovation strategies for growth through adequate policy interventions and studying the determinants of eco-innovation, is a central issue in the near future of developed countries (OECD, 2011 and EIO, 2011). Thus, our purpose is to investigate the extent to which environmental innovation is associated to human resource management (HRM) and organisational change (HPWP) implementation, by assessing their impact through the lens of complementarity theory (Milgrom and Roberts, 1990 and Milgrom and Roberts, 1995). In particular we analyse whether the implementation of joint HRM and HPWP strategies in fostering the adoption of firms’ EIs is more evident for manufacturing firms belonging to heavily environmental regulated sectors under many aspects such as CO2, emissions and waste.6 In fact, more stringent environmental standards might foster firms’ adoption of training and organisational innovation, which in turn could lead to further environmental innovation. The conceptual framework is that of the Porter idea of firm competitive advantages that reside in the firm value chain, within which “Strategy is manifested in the way activities are configured and linked together” ( Porter, 2010). 7 These ‘links’ are the complementarity we investigate. To be more precise in terms of the ample Porter-related literature available (Costantini and Mazzanti, 2012), we focus here on the weak aspect of the PH. The weak version predicts that additional innovations induced by regulations present opportunity costs on the one hand, but their gross benefits may be higher. The generation of those net benefits is also coherent with the assumption of initial profit maximising behaviour. Agents will be induced by new constraints to re-engineer and reorganise technology and organisation, to improve activity coordination and to align incentives for the purpose of meeting these constraints at a lower cost, resulting in more efficiency and increased productivity. This view is also compatible with a neo Schumpeterian approach, as the dynamics of innovation are linked and co-evolve with appropriability conditions and the generation of new economic performances (Dosi et al., 2006 and Malerba, 2007). We investigate the issue by using new and original data that covers 555 Italian firms belonging to environmentally regulated manufacturing sectors over the 2006–2008 period, the same time span covered by the last CIS. We thus assure potential comparability of results with CIS studies (see Horbach et al., 2012 for a recent analysis on Germany).8 CIS based studies surveyed by Mairesse and Mohnen highlight how issues regarding environmental innovation have recently made their appearance (Mairesse and Mohnen, 2010). Moreover, to better explore the complementary relationship within PH framework, we deepen our analysis on a subset of firms belonging to the most polluting sectors, which are those most challenged by environmental regulations. The paper is structured as follows: Section 2 presents the theoretical framework and lays out the main research hypotheses; Section 3 presents the survey and the original dataset; Section 4 shows the econometric analyses and complementarity tests; Section 5 concludes.

In the aim of providing new understanding about the effects of firms’ organisational changes on EI adoption, we study the relationships between human resource management and internal processes of organisational change in labour and production through the lens of the complementarity theory. Though the relevance of HPWP/HRM for developing relatively new and complex forms of innovations such as EI has been noticed by scholars that contributed to the development of the Porter hypothesis, the lack of integration between environmental economics and HRM disciplines has blocked research in this specific realm. We analyse diverse situations of potential complementarity between HRM and organisational changes, covering 4 different types of EI (CO2 abatement, emissions reduction, EMS/ISO adoption, energy/material efficiency). We show that for EI adopted by firms located in a densely industrial region of the European Union which is highly exposed to international competition, strict complementarity is rarely present. In contrast, when looking at the full sample of manufacturing firms, strict substitutability emerges in one case. Training in key competencies and organisational changes in production seem to suffer from a mismatch when considering their integration which highlights how green strategies are not fully embedded within firms’ reorganisation changes. Though the fact that EI development in countries such as Italy is still in a non-mature phase might be part of the explanation for this, the evidence can signal ‘problems’. We cannot say that observing substitutability is a weakness, given that EIs are possibly correlated to single factors. We note a lack of systemic innovation capability, which is one of the brakes behind the poor competitiveness and environmental performance of some (southern) EU countries at the moment. The evidence confirms the well-known fact that complementarity is not to be taken for granted: it is industry, innovation and factor specific. Its achievement requires a full screening of firms’ ‘existent assets’ and of those that could be ‘created’ (e.g. complementarity between assets as immaterial source of competitiveness). This requires proper investments in the re-engineering of firm organisation. Firms that are on the frontier of environmental technological challenges (more polluting firms, more heavily regulated firms) instead present some evidence which does not reject the ‘Porter hypothesis’ and which we here enrich with complementarity concepts. Complementarity emerges for CO2 abatement, through the integration of training coverage and organisation of production strategies. Sector specificity, namely heavier environmental regulations, influences the way firms behave with respect to the setting up of complementarity strategies. We observe complementarity related adoption of EI as an element of organisational change in firms that are subject to more stringent regulations. Nevertheless, the fact that strict complementarity is not a diffused factor behind the adoption of all environmental innovations comes in no way as a surprise. At this stage in the development of green strategies, the share of eco-firms is still limited even in advanced countries that are seeking for new competitive tools. Integration of EIs with the internal capabilities and firm's own assets is far from being achieved even in advanced and competitive industrial settings. Further research should be aimed both at extending evidence to an EU level (through the CIS2008) and at assessing the effects of EI (among EIs and between EI and other techno-organisational changes) on economic and environmental firms’ performance by also using a complementarity based perspective.