How Can Green Innovation Performance Be Improved in the Spanish Wine Industry?: An Analysis Based on Structural Equation Modeling

Introduction

Today's turbulent environment forces organizations to constantly create and maintain competitive advantages to ensure their existence. Industrial change is accelerating and, as a consequence, product life cycles are becoming shorter and shorter. In addition, there are increasing pressures on companies to develop their environmental management. On the one hand, customers are more aware of the environmental challenges facing the planet, which translates into a greater willingness to consume environmentally friendly products. On the other hand, environmental regulations are increasingly stringent, so organizations must adapt their operations to comply with the legislation in force in each country (Tan et al., 2021).

In the wine context, the proper environmental management of wineries is a matter of utmost importance for two main reasons. First, the sector has to face different climatic challenges that threaten its survival, such as climate change or water and energy scarcity (Cordano et al., 2010; Gilinsky et al., 2016). Secondly, the correct environmental management of wineries can derive in obtaining competitive advantages, with the consequent increase in market share as a consequence of greater differentiation of wineries, which is embodied, for example, in the production of organic, natural and biodynamic wines (Flores, 2018; Marco-Lajara et al., 2022a). In fact, previous research suggests that customers tend to select organic wines, even if they do not know what this implies (Schäufele & Hamm, 2017).

In the face of such environmental pressures from customers, society and governments, environmental management has begun to attract interest among academics from different fields. In this context, the Green Intellectual Capital (GIC) construct was developed by Chen (2008a) a little more than a decade ago, being widely developed and stimulated in academia to promote corporate environmentalism. GIC refers to the set of intangible resources linked to environmental protection (Chang & Chen, 2012; Marco-Lajara et al., 2022b). Recently, Marco-Lajara et al. (2022c) analyzed the GIC in the Spanish wine context, defining it as the set of environmental intangibles that wineries possess and that differentiate them from other competitors, allowing them to obtain a competitive advantage. In addition, they investigated the relationship between this set of green intangibles of wineries and the wineries' compliance with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (Marco-Lajara et al., 2022d; Marco-Lajara et al., 2022e; Marco-Lajara et al., 2022f; Marco-Lajara et al., 2022g; Fuentes-Fernández et al., 2022). However, two basic shortcomings can be identified in the research that has addressed this construct to date. On the one hand, despite being a prominent topic, there is still little research that has addressed the study of GIC, as well as its linkage with other variables. On the other hand, the literature shows the existence of contradictory effects between GIC and the attainment of competitive advantage (Chaudhry et al., 2016), so new research should continue to shed light on the effects generated by such a set of environmental intangibles. To fill this gap in the academic literature, the present research analyzes the mediating effect of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Knowledge Management (KM) on the GIC-Green Innovation Performance (GIP) relationship.