Leveraging corporate sustainability through responsible innovation: Capacity building with exploration and exploitation

The growing literature on corporate sustainability suggests its positive implications for organizations and stakeholders. Based on the social identity approach, the current study aims to investigate whether responsible innovation can leverage these sustainability advantages of companies to improve organizational commitment and competitiveness. Responsible innovation has been integrated into an original model as a construct that translates corporate sustainability into organizational outcomes to meet stakeholders' needs and to frame and solve the sustainability-related tensions in an ethical way. The study also attempts to examine the mediating impacts of exploration and exploitation orientations on the proposed link between corporate sustainability and responsible innovation. The model was validated by using the partial least squares structural equation modelling method on a sample of 196 middle managers in small businesses in Turkey. The findings reveal that responsible innovation has a significant mediation effect on the proposed links, and both exploration and exploitation elicit the innovation capacity in sustainability practices. The study also supports the argument on the positive impact of exploitation on exploration.