The Interplay of Green Intellectual Capital and Green Innovation Performance: Insights From Spain's Wine Sector

Introduction

In the contemporary business landscape, organizations find themselves compelled to continually conceive and sustain competitive advantages to secure their existence. Industrial dynamics are marked by an accelerating rate of change, precipitating concomitant reductions in product life cycles. Moreover, companies confront mounting pressures to bolster their environmental stewardship initiatives. On one hand, discerning consumers exhibit an increasing cognizance of the formidable environmental predicaments facing the planet, thereby manifesting a heightened proclivity for eco-conscious products. On the other hand, the regulatory framework pertaining to environmental compliance is growing progressively stringent, necessitating that organizations adapt their operational paradigms to align with extant legislation within each jurisdiction (Tan et al., 2021). Consequently, notwithstanding the ongoing discourse surrounding the alignment of environmental considerations with economic imperatives, corporations have come to acknowledge the imperative of orchestrating a judicious equilibrium between environmental management and economic performance (Calza et al., 2021).

What is more, according to specialists, finding the optimum balance between environmental management and economic performance represents a must in today’s context, especially when addressing the influence of intangible assets – such as, for instance, human capital and intellectual capital, which are a real challenge to measure (United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, 2016). Furthermore, in the context of sustainable development and sustainability, understanding and quantifying green intellectual capital and green innovation performance became necessary, in particular, for policymakers all over the world (Popescu, C. R. Gh., 2021; The Lisbon Council, 2023). Hence, there is the vital need to discover and value, in an optimum way, all the drivers of economic growth, while addressing the benefits of the labor market (Popescu & Popescu, 2019). Nevertheless, finding the instruments capable to assess the regions and the countries medium-term and long-term sustainability in order to measure the outcomes of human capital use and productivity performance have the purpose of ensuring that the sustainable development path will be reached (European Union Monitor, 2016; Popescu, 2020).

Within the context of the wine sector, the meticulous environmental governance of wineries assumes paramount significance for two principal rationales. Firstly, the industry grapples with an array of climatic vicissitudes that portend potential threats to its sustainability, encompassing challenges posed by climate variability and issues such as water and energy scarcity (Cordano et al., 2010; Gilinsky et al., 2016). Secondly, astute environmental stewardship within wineries can bestow a distinct competitive edge, thereby affording opportunities for market share augmentation emanating from heightened differentiation strategies, exemplified by the production of organic, natural, and biodynamic wines (Flores, 2018). In fact, antecedent scholarly investigations suggest that consumers exhibit a propensity to select organic wines, even in the absence of a comprehensive understanding of the nuanced implications of such choices (Schäufele and Hamm, 2017).