Innovating for Good in Opportunistic Contexts: The Case for Firms’ Environmental Divergence Leyva de la Hiz, Dante Ignacio Aragón Correa, Juan Alberto Earle, Andrew G. Organizations and natural environment Environmental innovations Opportunism Divergence This research work is partially funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and the European Regional Development Funds (Grant No. ECO2016-7509-P), the Spanish State Research Agency (Grant No. PID2019-106725GB-100; doi 10.13039/501100011033), Montpellier Research in Management (Grant No. EA 4557), and LabEx Entrepreneurship (Grant No. ANR-10-Labex-11-01). Opportunistic behaviors are considered ethically and strategically troublesome since they disrupt otherwise mutually beneficial relationships. Previous literature has shown that firms attempt to protect their investments from opportunism by generating a large amount of patented marginal innovations in domains central to their industry. However, this approach may generate some ethical dilemmas by preventing firms and societies from more radical, collaborative, and much-needed environmental progress. We extend the environmental innovation literature using strategic and ethical lenses to analyze the potential of an alternative, divergent way to provide financial opportunities for a focal firm without aiming to prevent innovative opportunities for competitors. Our longitudinal analysis of 6768 environmental patents from 59 large companies worldwide in the electrical components and equipment industry shows that high levels of innovation intensity, environmental scope, bargaining power, and environmental expertise increase the incidence of patented environmental innovations related to domains in which industry competitors are less focused (i.e., technological divergence). We also show a positive relationship between this divergence and market-based firm performance. Our results suggest that pursuing innovative divergence to avoid opportunism may make ethical and market sense and we also identify the organizational factors that can support these efforts. 2024-03-13T13:30:40Z 2024-03-13T13:30:40Z 2021-01-01 journal article Journal of Business Ethics, vol. 176 pag. 705-721 https://hdl.handle.net/10481/89966 10.1007/s10551-020-04693-0 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ open access Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Internacional Leyva-de la Hiz, D., Aragon-Correa, J.A. & Earle, A.G. Innovating for Good in Opportunistic Contexts: The Case for Firms’ Environmental Divergence. J Bus Ethics 176, 705–721 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-020-04693-0