Responding to environmental challenges is a new manifestation of innovation for organizations, which enables firms to gain competitive advantages by conducting innovative activities for not only themselves, but also for the whole society. In this context, much attention has been paid to “green creativity.” However, few studies have explored the impact of green creativity from the perspective of interactions between individuals and organizational contexts. Therefore, we aimed to explain the variance in employees’ green creativity by examining three factors outside the organizational context: transformational leadership, green human resource management (GHRM), and individual factors including employees’ green passion. Drawing from the ability–motivation–opportunity theory, we found that transformational leaders can inspire employees’ green passion through influencing GHRM, and ultimately positively affect employees’ green creativity. Data collected from two sources (employees and human resources managers) in medical firms in northeast China at two time points demonstrated the important effects of transformational leadership, GHRM, and employees’ green passion on green creativity, thus offering new theoretical insights and practical suggestions.

Purpose: Openness to external knowledge has recently gained popularity as a means for firms to complement and leverage internal knowledge in the pursuit of innovation outcomes. However, conflicting evidence exists regarding the role of openness in external knowledge acquisition. This paper aims to propose that openness to external knowledge has a nonlinear effect on innovation performance and that this nonlinear relationship is contingent on an ambidextrous knowledge search strategy.Design/methodology/approach: Based on original large-scale survey of 246 interfirm collaborations in the high-technology industry, it is found that the impact of openness to external knowledge on innovation performance exhibits an inverted-U shape and that this relationship is affected by an ambidextrous knowledge search strategy.Findings: The results indicate that an ambidextrous knowledge strategy that addresses the depth and breadth of external knowledge significantly influences a firm’s ability to derive benefits from increased openness to external knowledge. Empirically, the authors provide an original contribution to high-technology firms by exploring how and why an ambidextrous knowledge strategy can be a critical catalyst spurring innovation performance.Research limitations/implications: The research scope is limited to a single industry. Further research could extend the theoretical framework to multiple industries, which may increase the likelihood of innovation theory development.Practical implications: The results suggest that firms opening up the boundaries of their innovation activity to engage in external knowledge are able to leverage their in-house innovation to enhance their innovation performance. The authors advocate that in innovation management domains, greater emphasis is needed on how openness to external knowledge has more positive impacts not only on innovation performance but also on innovation implemented management.Originality/value: This study is among the first to investigate the ambidextrous knowledge search effect on the external knowledge of high-technology firms. This paper contributes to the theoretical and practical literature concerning openness innovation and knowledge management by reflecting on the ambidextrous knowledge search strategy.

In response to the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, this paper proposes a new National Sustainable Development Index (NSDI), based on the modification of the Human Development Index (HDI). The purpose of our research was to improve the widely adopted HDI index by incorporating more comprehensive sustainability perspectives, so as to help policy makers to better analyze the sustainability-related issues facing their countries. After clarifying the concept of sustainable development, our research suggests that this term represents a coordination and configuration of economic, social, and environmental aspects of development, with its major focuses on balancing intra-generational welfare and maximizing the total welfare across generations. We then put forward a novel NSDI framework including 12 indicators from dimensions of economy, resource environment, and society, and calculated the weights of 12 indicators using the entropy method. To further validate our proposed index, this paper also measured the NSDIs of 163 countries in the world, and compared this index with the HDI and other well-known modification indices of HDI. The results showed that the NSDI is a reliable and relative complete index for sustainable development assessment, which makes up for the shortcomings of existing indices.