Abstract
In the dynamic landscape of manufacturing, sustainable innovation has emerged as a critical driver for firms seeking to balance economic growth with environmental and social responsibility. Since firms have faced recent external shocks (e.g., the Covid-19 pandemic or the political conflicts among countries), the matters of sustainable innovation are more important than ever. Additionally, it is necessary to investigate the interplay between firms’ propensity to manage risks and sustainable innovation performance under the given context.
This study discusses the effects of entrepreneurial risk orientation on sustainable innovation and will examine the conceptual model with the Korean national data of the technology innovation for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) collected from 4,000 manufacturers in the high-tech industry in 2020.
Under the uncertain environment of the firm, since understanding of the effect of risk orientation on firm performance is important, this study focuses on entrepreneurial risk orientation (i.e., risk-taking, autonomy, innovativeness) among the various characteristics of EO. Under the given environment, based on the firm’s propensity to risk orientation, each firm can respond in different ways whether they will abandon, suspend, or postpone their innovation activity whether they will remain the current innovation activities, or whether they will do a newly added innovation activity. Therefore, examining the effects of entrepreneurial risk orientation on sustainable innovation performance will be timely and critical research.