Leveraging sustainable design practices through supplier involvement in new product development: The role of the suppliers' environmental management capability

Firms often aim to develop new products in an environmentally sustainable fashion, while at the same time ensuring profitability. While firms may aim to do so themselves through internal sustainable design practices, what has increasingly become prevalent is to leverage the expertise of suppliers in such endeavors. With this framing and by relying on the resource-based view and its extensions reflected in the natural resource-based view of the firm, this study develops a conceptual model theorizing how internal resources in the form of sustainable design practices enable a firm to improve the environmental and economic performance associated with new product development initiatives. Further, we propose that (external) supplier involvement in new product development complements a firm's internal efforts to reap benefits from sustainable design practices, with this complementary effect however being contingent on the suppliers' environmental management capability. The results from testing this model with empirical survey data provide important academic and managerial insights regarding how firms should best manage their efforts to develop environmentally friendly new products through the leveraging of both internal (firm) and external (supplier) resources.