Innovation processes in retailing: A way to green food retail?

Abstract: The retailing sector plays an important role in sustainable development and climate change. The grocery retailer serves as an intermediary between suppliers and consumers, and is thus in direct contact on a daily basis with consumers. This gives all stakeholders unique position from which to influence each other, i.e. on the production and consumption part of products, but also on in-store activities. Research on innovation and innovation processes primarily focuses on production companies or the entire retail sector, which is complex and diverse, but less on a specific branch within the sector, e.g. grocery retailers. It remains unclear how innovations are born and how they travel within the grocery retailer sector and within specific organisations. Advancing understanding of how organisational structure and innovation processes in grocery retailing interact and may influence the sustainability of retail operations is valuable knowledge for researchers and practitioners. The analysis of literature on innovation and organisational structure identified knowledge gap on why some organisations are more innovative than others. Bridging the gap cannot be done simply by investigating differences in organisational structure among different organisations, but must also involve an analysis of how organisations engage in the process of innovation and whether or how the organisational structure affects outcomes of the innovation process and, especially, innovation for sustainability. The main objective of this research is to provide a deeper understanding of how innovation processes in different organisational structures are shaped within the grocery-retail sector and how they may affect the uptake and implementation of eco-innovation. Furthermore, the goal is to understand which factors influence the innovation process and to study whether and where it is possible to improve the innovation process in order to reduce environmental impacts of in-store operations.