Importance of green innovation for business sustainability: Identifying the key role of green intellectual capital and green SCM

Abstract Organizations, while transforming resources into products and services and then into financial gains, consecutively neglect the adverse effects that are being caused to the environment and society. Hence, organizations should not focus on the financial aspects only; rather, they need to strive for business sustainability (BS). For an organization to become more sustainable, they need to tap and excel into green innovation (GIN), followed by green intellectual capital (GIC), whereas the role of green supply chain management practices (GSCMP) in this objective cannot be ignored. To fill this gap, we have established a framework based on the natural resource‐based view theory and extant literature that offers a foundation for sculpturing the process by which GIN was observed to capture BS through GIC and GSCMP. Primary data were collected from the Malaysian manufacturing industries, and partial least square structural equation modeling (PLS‐SEM) was applied to the sample of 243 respondents. The key findings reported that GIN has a positive and significant relationship with GIC, GSCMP, and BS. Further, GIC and GSCMP also positively and significantly affect BS. These findings have some certain recommendations for policymakers that the present study proposed. Mainly organizations need to develop their green and sustainable resources, which will help them develop according to the principles of BS and gain a competitive advantage in the long run. In the end, there are certain limitations of the present study on which the possibilities of future research are drawn.