Greening the Path to Family Firm Innovation: Empirical Evidence From the Spanish Manufacturing Industry

Are environmentally focused family firms really better innovators? This paper addresses this intriguing question and bridges the existing gap on the link between environmental investment and innovation within family firms, considering the mediating role of collaboration breadth, and the moderating influence of family management. Applying a moderated mediation analysis to an unbalanced panel dataset of 4836 observations of Spanish family firms, the results show that environmental investment has a positive impact on innovation. Collaboration breadth fully mediates the relationship between environmental investment and innovation. Moreover, family management strengthens this mediating relationship. That is, the adoption of technological collaboration is more likely to occur in environmentally focused family firms when there is a higher number of family members in the firm's TMT, ultimately leading to improved innovation outcomes. This study contributes to understanding how family firm dynamics influence sustainability-driven innovation, offering valuable insights for future research in this evolving field.