Responsible Innovation Management in Profit‐Driven Firms: A Cross‐Cultural Analysis in Germany, India, and Japan

ABSTRACT Responsible innovation (RI) challenges profit‐driven firms to reconcile market pressures with societal and environmental responsibilities. We ask how firms integrate anticipation, reflexivity, inclusion, and responsiveness (ARIR) into responsible innovation management (RIM), and how national context and cultural dimensions shape the degree and form of RIM. Using inductive grounded theory, we conducted 60 semi‐structured interviews with innovation managers and senior decision makers in multinational firms in Germany, India, and Japan. We develop a culturally anchored conceptual model in which external environments shape national dominant innovation foci, and both national innovation focus and cultural values act as antecedents of ARIR enactment, with top management's RI advocacy amplifying integration when responsibility is not institutionally dominant. Cross‐national comparisons reveal pillar‐specific patterns. German firms show broad ARIR alignment across all four pillars. Japanese firms exhibit a high degree of ARIR integration, but a form of RIM in which governance emphasis falls on anticipation, reflexivity, and inclusion, with responsiveness less developed as a proactive routine. Indian firms exhibit more variable alignment that strengthens when top management champions RI. By theorizing RIM as a process‐centric, variance‐sensitive construct and explaining its cultural contingencies, the study advances innovation management research on how firms institutionalize RI under persistent economic‐responsibility tensions.