Literature Review and Research Prospect on the Drivers and Effects of Green Innovation

With increasing and global environmental and climate problems, green innovation has become an important means to solve the environmental crisis. With the increasing practice of green innovation in enterprises, scholars at home and abroad have discussed the drivers and effects of green innovation from different perspectives. Based on an analysis of 119 articles about the drivers and effects of green innovation in top international journals from 2006 to 2021, this paper tries to find the consistencies and contradictions of research conclusions and to explore the possible research opportunities, sorting out the main theoretical mechanisms of the existing research on the drivers and effects of green innovation, pinpointing the consistency of these theoretical perspectives in explaining the different drivers and effects of green innovation, and putting forward research prospects. The results show that the drivers of green innovation include two kinds of factors: environment and organization. The pressure of external environment and system drives enterprises to adopt green innovation practices to cater to isomorphic factors, to obtain more environmental performance, and to improve organizational legitimacy. The lack of development resources, such as knowledge and technology, within an organization drives enterprises to carry out green innovation practices and enhance organizational competitive advantage by learning and absorbing new external knowledge, new technology and other resources. In addition, resource-based view and institutional theory are two commonly used theoretical perspectives, and their theoretical logic obtains consistent support in explaining the drivers and effects of enterprise green innovation.