A behavioral approach of the SME manager’s roles in the development of sustainability-oriented innovations
The sustainability issues offer considerable possibilities for sustainability-oriented innovations (SOI) to firms. To take advantage of it managers must be involved in the development of these innovations by playing three main roles: sustainable champion, sustainable entrepreneur and sustainable leader. The trait approach used to reveal these roles is insufficient to understand how managers succeed in developing SOI in various contexts. We propose a behavioral approach to answer this question while insisting on the complementary relationship between the three roles. At the end of the exploration of two case of SOI made by SMEs, our results show that to develop these innovations, SME’s managers undertake the three roles by behaving as active observers, handyman and networkers as well as composing with the constitutive events of the contexts in which they evolve. Our study concludes by suggesting an integrated model which presents the three roles and the behaviors by which they are enabled as the constituent dimensions of a single construct : the eco-innovator.