Exploring the driving orientations and driving mechanisms of environmental innovation: The case study of the China Gezhouba

The environmental innovation of traditional enterprises is an important measure of their sustainable development. This paper takes China Gezhouba Group Co., Ltd. (CGGC), a large traditional enterprise with a successful environmental transformation, as a case study. Based on many texts and the grounded theory, we build a driving mechanism model of CGGC's environmental innovation. The model shows an interaction mechanism that includes the three driving orientations of government, market and resource integration, as well as 20 driving factors beneath them. Using expert scoring, we find that CGGC's resource integration orientation makes the greatest contribution to its environmental innovation, followed by its market and government orientation. Additionally, the driving factors of national strategy, national policy, response to needs, government support, market strategy, and talent strategy are the top six contributing factors. The findings of this paper can help other traditional Chinese enterprises with backgrounds similar to CGGC. Based on the resource advantages of traditional enterprises, managers should reserve talents for the transformation and make the most of government-enterprise cooperation and market strategies, such as acquisitions, mergers, reorganization and joint ventures, to promote environmental innovation in their enterprises. (C) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.