Facing worldwide environmental and social concerns, manufacturing firms are trying to adopt effective environmentally friendly actions to mitigate their environmental impacts. Although the existent literature has provided many insights about the drivers of sustainable product innovation, little is known about the impact of firm growth. Thus, we intend to contribute to this gap in the literature by examining the impact that firm growth can have on sustainable product innovation. To achieve this goal, the partial least square (PLS) modeling technique was used to analyze a dataset of 3250 manufacturing firms from 39 different countries. The results reveal that firm growth exerts a positive effect on sustainable product innovation and that the relationship is partially mediated by the adoption of environmental practices. The findings also indicate that managerial barriers lessen the effectiveness of the adoption of environmental practices in facilitating the development of sustainable product innovation, while improving labor conditions increases it. However, operational barriers do not exert a significant moderating effect between the adoption of environmental practices and sustainable product innovation. These results prompt interesting insights related to theory development in environmental management and sustainable product innovation research.

This paper aims to develop a conceptual framework that explains how organizations address green growth. By integrating perspectives of organizational learning and ambidexterity, this paper proposes four archetypes of green-growth strategies. On the basis of exploration and exploitation dimensions, the proposed strategic green-growth archetypes are environmental-laggard, cooperative, entrepreneurial, and ambidextrous approaches. This paper suggests propositions about how to implement entrepreneurial and cooperative archetypes. It is also proposed that cooperative and entrepreneurial archetypes necessitate a set of the best and well-defined green human resource management (HRM) practices oriented towards strategic environmental goals. This paper thus proposes specific green HRM practices that better fit with each archetype. Lastly, this research concludes with a discussion of research implications.

Expanding dynamic capability theory, we propose environmental entrepreneurship orientation (EEO) as a dynamic capability to achieve a duality of goals—the simultaneous and synergistic realization of environmental and economic performance. We conceptualize a moderating effect of a company's knowledge base (public or private) on the relationship between EEO and the duality of goals. We test our hypothesis in Spanish companies by applying partial least squares modeling. We find that: a) EEO relates positively to both environmental and economic performance, b) public knowledge enhances the relation between EEO and environmental performance, and c) private knowledge strengthens the relation between EEO and economic performance. The implication of our findings is that firms need to simultaneously access public and private knowledge to optimize the influence of EEO on attaining this duality of goals.