ESG-driven innovation strategy and firm performance

Abstract This paper investigates the impact of aligning an innovation strategy with Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) practices on innovation and non-innovation performance variables. Drawing on principles from Stakeholder Theory and Social Network Theory of Innovation, the research hypothesizes that ESG-driven firms will outperform firms that are not ESG-driven in terms of future innovation outcomes, labor productivity, exporting and survival rates. Using the Technological Innovation Panel (PITEC) database, a panel of Spanish companies, the study compares the performance of two groups of innovative firms: firms that declare that at least one of the ESG goals are relevant for their innovation activities (ESG-driven companies) and matched firms that regard all three ESG goals as not important (non-ESG companies). Our findings reveal that ESG-driven companies exhibit a better future innovation performance and that, in terms of labor productivity, exporting, and survival their performance is never inferior than that of innovative firms that are not ESG-driven.