How do intellectual property rights and government support drive a firm's green innovation? The mediating role of open innovation

Although the existing literature on green innovation has little focus on the mediation role of open innovation, we aimed to explore how intellectual property rights and government support affect green innovation through open innovation. Drawing upon open innovation literature, this paper aims to investigate, at the firm level, the structural causality between internal and external resources and examine the role of open innovation on green innovation divided into green process and green product innovation. We attempt to suggest a structural model comparing open innovation's direct and mediating role using data from manufacturing sectors in South Korea from 2014 to 2016. The methodology was based on the partial least square structural equation method (PLS-SEM) with 1203 samples. The results revealed that a firm's intellectual property rights and government support significantly affect open innovation, green process innovation, and green product innovation while open innovation played a mediating role between each. Additionally, we provide a supplementary analysis using the sample-split test by comparing the sensitivity to partner selection and the multigroup test by firm size. This study proposes several implications emphasizing the mediating role of open innovation in enhancing green process innovation along with the direct and indirect effect of intellectual property rights and government support on green innovation.