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Kinh tế - Kỹ thuật
diversification have two dimensions. A change may be vertical, resulting in quality improvement
or deterioration, or it may be horizontal, involving an increase or decrease in the number of sizes,
colors, and shapes in which the product is made.
However, whether a product is green constitutes a complex issue and is often the subject
of debate. Products that are claimed to have ‘environmental benefits’ possess - more often than
not – no such qualities, but they are simply less harmful to the natural environment than others.
Therefore, green products are herein defined as new products whose greenness is significantly
better than conventional or competitive products. Greenness is continuous rather than dichotomous
: « green » products represent a significant improvement in greenness, which can be either small
or large, whereas ‘non-green’ refers to no or an insignificant improvement in greenness. So green
product diversification includes horizontal and vertical green product diversification, which
relate to technological,organizational, social, or institutional changes contributing to a reduction
of environmental burdens from the production process and products (Rennings, 2000; Chenet
al., 2006).
Horizontal green product diversification
In line whit the above notion of green product diversification, the horizontal green product
diversification could be defined as a mechanism in which firms making these goods are incorporating
environmental product attributes into the over all product mix and not simply “tacking them
on” to existing products as an after thought (ex-ante but not ex-post). The characteristics of
green product, in fact, can be communicated externally through eco-labeling (Albino et al.,
2009). With the increasing demand for green products, eco-labeling can serve as an instrument
for stakeholders to recognize the environmental characteristics of products. Given the complex
nature of the environmental impact of products along their life cycle, eco-labeling can reduce
asymmetric information among stakeholders (Gallastegui, 2002; Pujari, 2006), help companies
toward environmental sustainability, and enhance their competitive advantage (Pujari et al., 2003;
Dangelico and Pujari, 2010). In this way, the firms are making en vironmental objectives as
important as “other” financial objectives (i.e.profitability, market share, etc.). Firms are
finding that “going green” makes good business sense as well as good environmental sense
(Menon and Menon, 1997, Por ter and van der Linde, 1995).
Vertical green product diversification
The vertical green product diversification consist to produce new green products thank to
green process innovation. It’s used as an instrument to improve firms’ environmental management
process (Chen et al., 2006), allowing the industrial production process to realize the environmental
sustainability vision and the potentialities of eco-efficiency (Porter and Van der Linde, 1995; Hart
and Ahuja, 1996). Issued by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) in 1996,
ISO 14001 has been steadily and increasingly adopted and has become the most recognized
environmental management program in the world (Nishitani, 2009). The implementation of ISO
14001 certification can bring about reduction in firms’ environmental impact, improvement of
operational efficiency and effectiveness (Jiang and Bansal, 2003; King et al., 2005), and signal to
external stakeholders afirm’s environmental commitment (Johnstone and Labonne, 2009; Nishitani,
2009). Stakeholder pressure attaches an important weight to firms’ adoption of ISO 14001 (Delmas
and Toffel, 2004; Johnstone and Labonne, 2009; Takahashi and Nakamura, 2010). In this study,
ISO 14001 certification is used as a measurement of vertical green product diversification.
2.2. Stakeholder Pressure
La partie prenante est définie comme «tout groupe ou tout individu qui peut affecter ou être affecté
