2.1. Green Search and Green Innovation
Green innovation is a crucial way for enterprises to solve environmental pollution under environmental regulations. It can not only reduce the total carbon emissions and the existing environmental load, but also meet the consumers’ green preferences [
19,
20]. More specifically, green innovation can support a healthy lifestyle and reduce the customers’ health risks [
21]. For enterprises, green innovation can not only improve the corporate image [
22,
23,
24] and achieve better customer satisfaction, but also improve the market share, profit growth, return on sales, and others [
21,
25,
26]. Green search is described as a collection of activities in which firms span temporal, spatial, and organizational boundaries to search and identify new knowledge, aiming to create green products that meet the market. The innovative search for external resources can be divided into the search breadth and search depth [
27,
28]. This study defined the green search breadth as the scope of the external search for green knowledge. For example, the enterprise often participate sin trade exhibitions and academic conferences related to environmental protection and reads professional journals and magazines to follow the latest trends in the market and emerging environmental protection technologies. The search depth describes the depth of the external search. For instance, the enterprise will continue to search for green information until all relevant information is determined, reflecting the deeper relationship between enterprises and green resources. In addition, green innovation includes green exploratory and exploitative innovation [
15]. The former refers to using new knowledge and skills to create new green products or green markets [
9]. Then, the latter is how enterprises use environmental knowledge, technology, and ability to improve the original green products and green design [
29].
Considerable green heterogeneous resources exist outside the enterprises [
9]. As training bases for national talents, universities and research institutes possess the most advanced technology and the strongest research and development capabilities [
30]. As the initiator of ecological innovation, the government has proposed various environmental regulations and punitive measures, requiring the production of enterprises to meet the requirements of ecological environmental protection [
11]. Meanwhile, the government has proposed various subsidy policies to reduce the cost of high-quality development [
31]. Supply chain partners enjoy novel ideas [
26], the latest market information [
11] as well as advanced ecological technologies, green processes, marketing concepts, and others [
32,
33]. All kinds of professional knowledge generated from these different complementary sources supplement the capability and resource base for green development.
According to resource-based theory, valuable and scarce resources determine the sustainable competitive advantage of enterprises [
34]. Collecting information from various external sources can help enterprises quickly obtain the resources and capabilities needed for innovation. On one hand, an extensive collection of ecological technologies and green processes related to green environmental protection will promote the diversification of green innovative knowledge sources. This case is beneficial for obtaining complementary and more valuable information based on original knowledge [
35]. Meanwhile, the efficiency of solving the original problems can be effectively improved by recombining the external complementary resources with the original environmental knowledge within the enterprise, which will lay a knowledge foundation for enterprises to break through the original bottleneck of ecological technology [
36]. On the other hand, regularly participating in trade exhibitions and academic conferences related to environmental protection can increase the diversity of knowledge, enrich the original knowledge base, and broaden the vision of new knowledge in developing new green products. Such participation can stimulate the generation of new ideas related to green production [
37] and provide enterprises with more options to solve new problems [
35]. Hence, this event will lay a foundation for enterprises to create new green products and green markets and is beneficial to green exploratory innovation. Thus, the following hypotheses are posited:
Hypothesis 1a (H1a): The green search breadth has a positive impact on green exploitative innovation.
Hypothesis 1b (H1b): The green search breadth has a positive impact on green exploratory innovation.
In addition to the green search breadth, a deep interaction also exists between enterprises and their knowledge sources. This case can be described as enterprises that continue to search for similar green knowledge outside. Based on the resource-based theory, when enterprises obtain the information they need continuously, they have the corresponding ability to create new things. On one hand, continuously searching for knowledge related to existing green products in the organization is conducive to strengthening the understanding of original knowledge [
38]. Organizations may have more opportunities to identify the potential value of energy-saving materials and the internal relationship among the knowledge components of green products [
39], which helps firms reduce the possibility of innovative errors and failures [
27]. Consequently, such a continuous search for knowledge is helpful in breaking the innovation bottleneck of existing research and achieving green exploitative innovation. For example, a garment enterprise located in Wenzhou, Zhejiang Province, has collected, sorted, and loosened waste textiles by obtaining professional knowledge of recycled fiber spinning technology from external sources, which, in turn, reduces the environmental pollution.
On the other hand, the continuous search for similar environmental knowledge can strengthen the frequent communication with external knowledge sources (e.g., green suppliers and green environmental protection organizations). This search is conductive to understand the potential value and front-end demand of the green product market and consumer market. Therefore, aiming at the forefront of environmental protection technology and ecological practice is favorable, and new green products and green markets should be explored. For example, the carton packaging industry has conducted cross-border research on the dairy industry, and the results showed that consumers generally disliked yogurt sticking to the container wall. Hence, the company shifted to foldable packaging as the research direction for new products, which improved the recycling rate of cartons through ecological product design. Based on these findings, we propose that:
Hypothesis 1c (H1c): The green search depth has a positive impact on green exploitative innovation.
Hypothesis 1d (H1d): The green search depth has a positive impact on green exploratory innovation.
2.2. Mediating Role of Green Output Control
As few firms have the complete knowledge and resources to achieve green innovation [
2], several firms are trying to achieve high-quality development with the help of external search [
40]. When the enterprise obtains external knowledge and information related to green products, some situations will affect the transmission efficiency and quality of ecological technology and knowledge. These situations involve the opportunistic behavior of idleness and “free-riding” [
41], the lack of transparency and asymmetry of green information [
42], the environmental uncertainty in technology, demand, and supply, and others [
26,
43,
44]. The above problems will increase the transaction cost of ecological knowledge transfer and the uncertainty of the productive process. In addition, the more knowledge you search for, the more difficult it is to integrate and absorb knowledge [
11,
45]. As a result, the demand for knowledge processing will become stronger.
According to information processing theory, the organizational structure of enterprises can be regarded as an information processing system. When the uncertainty of the organizational environment increases, the organization will face more information processing demands [
26,
46,
47]. Thus, its ability to collect, integrate, process, and distribute information should be improved to match the processing demands [
26,
48]. Based on transaction cost theory, some problems such as unsmooth information communication channels, high information collection costs, and asymmetric and opaque information will generate large transaction costs in the process of the internal governance of enterprises [
42,
49].
The mechanism of internal control has properties of inherent information processing [
50]. Internal control can not only improve the quality of information transmission, but also effectively reduces opportunistic behavior and transaction costs [
51,
52]. Therefore, according to transaction cost theory and organizational information processing theory, enterprises need to establish a mechanism of green control within the organization. The reason is that this mechanism will reduce environmental uncertainty and opportunistic behavior [
53] and achieve a firm’s sustainable development goal. Green control can be divided into green output control and green behavior control [
51,
54,
55]. Output control aims to supervise and control the specific objectives and results that the organization needs to achieve [
51]. The measures of control include goal setting, performance reports, a reward and punishment system, and others. Meanwhile, output control will often examine the results of the realization of the goal instead of interfering with the realization process [
56]. More specifically, the employees are allowed to achieve their goals in different ways [
57]. The setting of goals provides a standard for performance evaluation. Simultaneously, the setting of goals allows for the clarification of the expectations of all parties and improving the consistency of goals [
58]. Many enterprises regard output control as an effective measure to encourage employees to develop green products. For example, the company Gree adheres to the development strategy of green innovation. Moreover, an employee who successfully develops low-carbon, environmentally friendly, and energy-saving products will receive a substantial reward. Inspired by this goal, the staff developed and manufactured ecological products actively and achieved good economic and environmental benefits.
Green information such as green materials, green processes, and the consumers’ preferences for green products can be searched by suppliers, customers, scientific research institutions, and others. These sources of information are relatively extensive; meanwhile, the types and quantity of knowledge are varied. Quickly identifying knowledge needed for green product innovation from a large amount of knowledge is difficult for enterprises. According to the theory of organizational information processing, organizations must screen and integrate the vast knowledge to ensure that the knowledge can be quickly absorbed and transformed. That is, enterprises need to realize the matching of the information processing ability and processing needs. Therefore, the external knowledge must be processed before it can be used effectively. On one hand, organizations prefer to follow the original track in production to reduce the costs, uncertainty, and meet the needs of the original product market [
59]. In other words, organizations are more likely to improve the quality, save energy, and reduce consumption based on original green products. Employees can be guided to screen ecological technologies, green materials, and green market information related to original green products actively through rewarding and punishing depending on the results of the green information screening and integration and whether the product meets the expected specifications and standards. Meanwhile, applying the screened knowledge to the original green product and green process specifications can meet the needs of the enterprise for the transformation and utilization of green information. Hence, improving the original products and technologies is beneficial, that is, it has a positive impact on green exploitative innovation.
On the other hand, as diversified green knowledge consumes too much channel management and search costs, enterprises are more inclined to maximize the use of knowledge [
43]. In particular, firms tend to use knowledge to develop new products and expand new markets under the condition of meeting the original market [
60]. However, developing new green products is full of great uncertainty [
43,
44], and it is not only difficult but also time-consuming. Employees can be endowed with some autonomy through rewards and punishments, depending on the results of the screening and integration of diversified green knowledge without intervening in its process [
56,
58]. The flexibility of employees in processing and integrating green information will also be improved. This case is more likely to generate innovative and flexible ideas [
61], which will increase the possibility of new ecological knowledge combinations and create new ecological products. Thus, this event will realize the matching between the information processing capability and requirements [
62,
63] and lay the foundation for green exploratory innovation. Thus, we assume that:
Hypothesis 2 (H2): The green output control plays an intermediary role between green search breadth and green innovation ((a) green exploitative innovation and (b) green exploratory innovation).
To produce green products that meet the market and the end customers, a deep search of green knowledge is also essential to control the results.
On one hand, searching for external green knowledge frequently can strengthen the organizations’ understanding of the original green products or services [
9]. Nevertheless, with the deepening of the search, the specialization and structural complexity of knowledge will increase [
38]. Moreover, employees may have more difficulties in understanding and integrating green knowledge. Rewarding employees by successfully integrating knowledge or creating high-quality green products can increase the consistency of the objectives [
64]. Meanwhile, sharing, exchanging, and integrating tacit knowledge and complex technologies actively related to original green production are conductive [
65], which will improve the information integration and absorption abilities of the employees. Employees can easily identify the potential value of the original energy-saving materials and the internal relationship of the original green product knowledge components. Therefore, breaking through the bottleneck of green innovation and promoting green exploitative innovation are beneficial [
39].
On the other hand, the continuous search for environmental knowledge may confine the enterprises’ perspective to the current knowledge framework, which is liable to form functional fixation and inertial thinking [
66]. This search is not only inconducive to the understanding and acceptance of new knowledge, but is also unable to meet the needs of the development of new markets. Limiting the time of developing new products, putting forward the expected green environmental protection standards for the final new products (new services), clarifying the required objectives in environmental protection, that is, controlling the results of the employees’ exploratory learning will help employees remove the constraints of prior experience and inertial thinking. Meanwhile, fully tapping the technology that is hidden behind similar knowledge is helpful, which benefits the development of new products. Finally, the continuous search for environmental knowledge lays the foundation for creating and designing green products and green processes that are different from the original production [
67] and promotes green exploratory innovation. Therefore, we proposed that:
Hypothesis 3 (H3): The green output control plays an intermediary role between green search depth and green innovation ((a) green exploitative innovation and (b) green exploratory innovation).
2.3. Mediating Role of Green Behavior Control
Ensuring that the product meets the expected environmental standard (i.e., green output control) can promote the transformation of knowledge into innovation effectively. If the behaviors or processes to achieve the goal can be monitored at once, then the synergistic effect of the two controls may be realized. That is, the overall effect of “1 + 1 > 2” [
57]. An organization can adopt diversified advanced technologies. However, if the internal employees of the enterprise are not willing to take the initiative in environmental collaboration, then this diversity may not work and the uncertainty of green innovation will also increase [
68]. Accordingly, in addition to the result control, having a green behavior control for the green processes, ecological technologies, and green marketing concepts obtained from the government, supply chain partners, and other organizations is particularly important.
Behavior control is used to reduce the uncertainty by setting appropriate boundaries on the firm’s behavior [
44,
69] and pays more attention to the process of achieving the goal [
56]. The control measures include the regular or irregular supervision and inspection of enterprises, whether the process of the product meets the green environmental protection standards, and others [
70,
71]. Behavior control requires departments or employees to participate in and take risks actively [
55]. Simultaneously, some rigid measures will be taken to prohibit or punish the behaviors that violate the requirements of green environmental protection [
56]. Moreover, behavior control will put forward improvement suggestions for the production activities and processes of enterprises regularly [
70,
71], which will promote communication among the employees positively.
In the process of the internal governance of an enterprise, some problems such as information asymmetry and opacity caused by poor information communication often exist. These problems will cause large transaction costs and increase the operating burden [
42,
49]. Based on transaction cost theory, enterprises must take effective control measures to reduce invalid transaction costs to improve the performance of the firms. On one hand, the diversity of green knowledge has enriched the reservoir of original knowledge [
35], which contributes to improving the ability to identify the value of original ecological knowledge. Nevertheless, the existence of internal opportunistic behaviors will reduce the knowledge sharing among employees [
41], which is not conducive to a breakthrough in the original products and technologies. When the organization supervises the behavior of knowledge sharing and the communication of employees, employees can acquire knowledge related to the original production in time, which will reduce the search and time costs. Meanwhile, the efficiency of reorganization and transformation toward external and original knowledge will be improved [
65]. Therefore, this case provides a knowledge base for enterprises to break through the original bottleneck of green innovative technology and promote green exploitative innovation.
On the other hand, the diversification of green knowledge increases the possibility of a combination of new knowledge [
72]. The organization can develop new products and new markets through diversified ecological knowledge. However, diversified knowledge increases the difficulty of knowledge integration and the uncertainty of the knowledge integration results [
9,
73]. Employees have difficulties in ensuring that knowledge can be transformed and utilized successfully. Some measures such as requiring employees to strictly abide by the manufacturing process and green environmental protection standards specified by the organization and having feedback for the results of integrating knowledge actively are absolutely necessary. The reason is that such measures can reduce the invalid transaction costs caused by poor information communication and the nonstandard process of integrating knowledge. These measures can also improve the efficiency of knowledge integration. Therefore, the possibility of developing new products and achieving green exploratory innovation would increase.
Based on the above analysis, this study puts forward the following assumption:
Hypothesis 4 (H4): Green behavior control plays an intermediary role between green search breadth and green innovation ((a) green exploitative innovation and (b) green exploratory innovation).
In addition to controlling the diversified green knowledge integration process, having a behavior control for some information related to their own production searched deeply by enterprises is particularly important. Such information includes green processes, environmental protection technology, green marketing concepts, and others. On one hand, searching for similar environmental protection technologies, green processes, and green raw materials continuously is conducive to deepening the understanding of original knowledge [
9]. However, a continuous search for similar knowledge can easily lead to organizational rigidity [
9]. For instance, to maintain a firm’s status quo, employees may hide the problems caused by the original knowledge, whereas the company will become increasingly rigid by constantly searching for similar knowledge [
73,
74]. One of the characteristics of green behavior control is the regular or irregular supervision and inspection of the process of using knowledge. This case can not only find and correct the problems in the original production process in time [
52], but also avoid the invalid transaction cost caused by the failure of the innovation process [
52]. Moreover, this event will improve the transformation efficiency of knowledge. All of these will lay a solid foundation for green exploitative innovation.
On the other hand, the encouragement and guidance for actively participating in external learning, which includes conferences, workshops, and seminars related to new environmental protection products, can expand their awareness of similar green knowledge outside the enterprise. Meantime, fully tapping the deep-seated and cutting-edge green technology knowledge hidden behind similar environmental protection technologies is conducive [
68]. This event will reduce the repeated search cost of green knowledge and increase the possibility of new green knowledge reorganization. Finally, the green exploratory innovation of enterprises will be promoted.
Based on the above analysis, this study proposes the following assumption:
Hypothesis 5 (H5): Green behavior control plays an intermediary role between green search depth and green innovation ((a) green exploitative innovation and (b) green exploratory innovation).
The research model is shown in
Figure 1.