SUSTAINABLE PRODUCT INNOVATION PRACTICES AND RESULTS OF TEXTILE MANUFACTURING FIRMS IN TURKEY

Manufacturing firms have responsibilities towards the environment and society to provide sustainable development when launching a new product. The issue of sustainable product innovation (SPI) comes into a prominent one at this point and manufacturing enterprises should allocate resources to SPI practices to sustain competitive advantages. In literature, the relationship between these expenditures, practices, and expected results for SPI in the manufacturing industry is almost missing and there have not come across any studies that clearly addressed these relationships yet. This research contributes to filling this gap in the literature by exploring these relationships in the textile manufacturing industry. The study also aims to investigate by an exploratory model including five hypotheses based on research questions that debate whether the expenditures made for sustainable product innovation in the textile manufacturing firms affect the environmental and societal practices of SPI and whether these practices have a positive effect on the SPI results. For this purpose, data were collected from the textile manufacturing companies through an online questionnaire, and data analysis was performed by using the PLS-SEM via Smart PLS software. The results show that SPI expenditures have a positive impact on environmental and societal practices, and SPI results. Moreover, it was observed that the environmental practices carried out to obtain SPI reached the results of SPI while the societal-oriented practices did not achieve the desired results, in textile manufacturing firms. These results could be utilized by textile product development leaders and policymakers in terms of the reflection of sustainable innovation practices on the results.