Presenting a Model for Innovative Capabilities Development, Focusing on Green Innovations

Nowadays, capabilities for continuous sustainable innovation creation and development in organizations is considered as a vital mean to achieve competitive advantage in complicated and changing business environments. In the automotive industry, due to the significant impact of its products on environmental challenges emergence and regulatory constraints increase, it requires new capabilities and competencies development for successful implementation of green innovations and achieving sustainability goals. Accordingly, this study’s purpose is providing a model for innovative capabilities development, focusing on how to strategically enhance green innovations in the automotive industry using qualitative and quantitative (mixed) methods. In the qualitative section, Data gathered by extensive literature review and doing interviews with 14 experts through Thematic Analysis method with Maxqda software, and the research model was presented in the form of 84 indicators, 16 components and 4 main dimensions. In the quantitative section, with the Fuzzy Best Worst Method and Lingo software, dimension ranking was done and results reveal that the dimensions of green research and development, environmental factors, green organizational contexts, and green operational practices, respectively, have the greatest significance for developing green innovation capabilities in the automotive industry. According to research findings and considering the technological gaps and constraints in the Iranian automotive industry, focusing on the successful incremental green innovation implementation taking into account environmental incentives and internal technological learning capacities, along with specialized networking to promote clean advanced technologies and developing effective regulatory mechanisms are recommended.