With the rapid development of digital technologies and increasing public attention on environmental problems, it has become a new challenge for global enterprises to manage supply chains responsibly, so as to improve their innovation performance for sustainability. Prior works have identified the effects of supply chain integration on firm innovation in advanced economies; however, so far, there has been limited research on the relationships between supply chain integration and firm innovation in emerging and developing countries. Hence, building upon transaction cost and resource dependence theories, this study used China’s manufacturing industry as the research setting, probing the dynamic mechanisms between supply chain integration and firm innovation. The results show that the degree of supply chain integration positively relates to firms’ patent output but negatively relates to their innovation efficiency, and that a sustainable policy moderates the foregoing associations. Our study enriches the body of knowledge regarding responsible supply chain integration in a new digital age with growing ecological concerns and thereby offers insightful practical implications for practitioners and policy makers.

Servitization is important for manufacturers’ strategic transition, yet applying servitization has significant barriers. Business model innovation is regarded as a systematic solution of overcoming the barriers. However, it has been insufficiently studied especially in emerging economies. Therefore, we conducted a multi-case study of two leading piano manufacturers engaging in services in China, and explore the process of business model innovation for their servitization. This study finds that, with the facilitation of dynamic capabilities, manufacturers address the barriers through business model innovation in three elements of content, structure and governance, and finally form a new business model with ambidexterity, in which efficiency-centred theme and novelty-centred theme can coexist, interact, and dynamically match with emerging economies’ context. This study provides new insights on how manufacturers in emerging economies conduct business model innovation for realizing their servitization transformation.