The research, published in the journal Discover Sustainability by a team from HUTECH University and Van Lang University in Ho Chi Minh City, set out to answer a question that has been surprisingly underexplored: does a proactive environmental strategy push firms toward digital transformation and green innovation at the same time, and do those two channels then carry the firm toward better sustainable performance? Drawing on the Resource-Based View and Dynamic Capabilities Theory, the authors built an integrated model and tested it statistically across a large, diverse sample of enterprises.

The theoretical framing matters. The Resource-Based View holds that firms win when they possess valuable, rare and hard-to-imitate resources, while Dynamic Capabilities Theory emphasises the ability to sense change, seize opportunities and reconfigure operations accordingly. A proactive environmental strategy, in this reading, is not merely compliance or public relations. It is an organisational-level resource that can be converted into dynamic capabilities, specifically the technological and innovative capacities that let a firm monitor, manage and reduce its environmental footprint while staying commercially competitive.

To test this, the researchers surveyed senior managers at 602 manufacturing enterprises and analysed the data using partial least squares structural equation modelling, or PLS-SEM, in the software package SmartPLS 4. This technique allows researchers to estimate multiple cause-and-effect pathways simultaneously and to assess how well each proposed link holds up in the data. The measurement scales, adapted from established literature, asked managers to rate statements about everything from top-management commitment and environmental training to the use of IoT sensors, artificial intelligence and eco-design principles.

The headline finding is clear: proactive environmental strategy is positively associated with both digital transformation and green innovation, and each of those, in turn, is positively associated with sustainable performance. The pattern is consistent with partial mediation, meaning that part of the benefit of an environmental strategy flows through these two channels rather than acting directly. Notably, the analysis found the two pathways to be parallel and comparably weighted, rather than one dominating the other. Digital transformation and green innovation function as complementary mechanisms, not rivals.

The digital pathway is particularly striking in its practical detail. Managers reported using IoT sensors to monitor energy consumption and emissions in real time across facilities, and deploying artificial intelligence or advanced analytics to optimise resource flows and cut waste. Digital technologies, respondents said, had fundamentally changed how firms monitor, manage and report their environmental impact. In other words, the environmental agenda is giving firms a concrete reason to invest in digital tools, and those tools then deliver the granular data needed to make sustainability measurable.

The green innovation pathway runs alongside it. Firms with proactive environmental strategies reported developing new products with significantly lower environmental impact than existing alternatives, investing substantially in research and development for clean technologies and processes, and embedding eco-design principles of reduce, reuse and recycle throughout product development. Sustainable performance itself was assessed across three dimensions: reduced greenhouse gas emissions and environmental discharges, improved financial results through resource-efficiency savings, and growing revenue from environmentally certified or green-labelled products and services.

Where does the environmental strategy come from in the first place? The study identified four antecedents that predict it: organisational support, dynamic environment, green transformational leadership and stakeholder pressure. Organisational support showed up as strong top-management commitment, dedicated budgets for environmental initiatives and employee training. Dynamic environment captured rapidly shifting competitive, customer and regulatory conditions. Green transformational leadership described leaders who articulate a compelling green vision, challenge employees to think creatively about environmental problems and inspire active contribution to environmental goals. Stakeholder pressure reflected customers demanding environmental certification, rising regulatory compliance burdens and growing community expectations.

One of the most interesting results is a null finding. The researchers tested whether industry type, specifically resource-intensive versus high-technology manufacturing, moderates the link between environmental strategy and digital transformation. It does not. The relationship appears stable across manufacturing contexts, which is good news for policymakers and managers alike: the strategy-to-digital connection is not confined to high-tech sectors but holds for heavy industry too. This suggests that the mechanisms at work are organisational rather than sector-specific, rooted in how firms marshal resources and respond to dynamic environments.

The implications reach well beyond Vietnam. Emerging economies are industrialising fast, and their manufacturing sectors face intense scrutiny over emissions and resource use. This study offers evidence that the dual transition, green and digital, can be managed as a single coherent strategy rather than two separate programmes. For managers, the message is that leadership vision, internal support and responsiveness to stakeholders build the environmental strategy that then unlocks both digital capability and innovation. For researchers, the integrated model demonstrates how two classic theories can be combined to explain how strategic intent becomes operational capability. As global supply chains increasingly demand verified sustainability, firms that treat environmental strategy as a driver of technological renewal may find themselves ahead of the curve, converting regulatory pressure into competitive advantage rather than cost.

Subject of Research: The relationship between proactive environmental strategy, digital transformation, green innovation and sustainable performance in Vietnamese manufacturing firms

Article Title: Environmental strategy and digital transformation: pathways to green innovation and sustainable performance in Vietnamese manufacturing firms

Article References: Tran, V. T., Nguyen, T. B., Le, N. N. T., Ngo, N. N. T., & Mai, B. D. (2026). Environmental strategy and digital transformation: pathways to green innovation and sustainable performance in Vietnamese manufacturing firms. Discover Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43621-026-04755-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43621-026-04755-9

Keywords: proactive environmental strategy, digital transformation, green innovation, sustainable performance, Vietnamese manufacturing, emerging economies, PLS-SEM, Resource-Based View, dynamic capabilities, green transformational leadership, stakeholder pressure, sustainability

The research, led by Wonsha Michael Didiso with colleagues Brehanu Borji Ayalewu and Sintayehu Assefa Yirga, arrives at a moment of transformation for Ethiopian finance. The sector has grown rapidly as the National Bank of Ethiopia pushes modernization and opening-up reforms, exposing private banks to intensifying competition, economic uncertainty, and shifting customer expectations. Against this backdrop, the team asked a deceptively simple question: does carefully reading the business environment actually make banks perform better, and if so, how does that information travel from the boardroom to the bottom line?

To answer it, the researchers targeted the entire workforce of Ethiopian private banks, a population of 147,367 employees according to the National Bank of Ethiopia’s 2024/2025 annual report. Using a standard sample-size formula attributed to Kothari, they drew 383 respondents through simple random sampling, distributing structured questionnaires across head offices and district operations in Addis Ababa, Hawassa, and Bahir Dar. The survey was translated into Amharic and independently back-translated into English to eliminate linguistic bias, piloted with 30 bank employees excluded from the main survey, and ultimately returned 375 usable responses, a 98 percent response rate that lends unusual confidence to the dataset.

The methodological machinery behind the analysis is where the study earns its scientific weight. The team employed structural equation modeling, supported by exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, to test whether the abstract constructs of environmental scanning, competitive strategy, and organizational performance could be reliably measured and causally linked. Reliability was strong across the board: Cronbach’s alpha values ranged from 0.789 to 0.859 for the seven scanning dimensions, including PESTEL analysis, SWOT analysis, Five Forces analysis, scenario planning, benchmarking, gap analysis, and resource-based view analysis. The Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin measure of sampling adequacy reached 0.960, an exceptionally high score indicating the data were superbly suited for factor analysis.

Model fit statistics told a similarly convincing story. The chi-square to degrees-of-freedom ratio of 2.980 sits just below the conventional threshold of 3, while the Goodness-of-Fit Index, Normed Fit Index, Tucker-Lewis Index, and Comparative Fit Index all exceeded 0.9. The root mean square error of approximation was 0.061, comfortably under the 0.08 cutoff that signals minimal discrepancy between the model’s predictions and the observed data. In plain terms, the statistical architecture of the study held together well enough that its substantive findings deserve serious attention.

Those findings are strikingly consistent. Every one of the seven environmental scanning tools showed a positive and statistically significant effect on organizational performance, with scenario planning and resource-based view analysis posting the strongest coefficients at 0.895 and 0.872 respectively. Environmental scanning as a whole carried a direct effect of 0.36 on bank performance, while its effect on competitive strategy reached 0.894. Competitive strategy itself, spanning cost leadership, differentiation, and focus approaches drawn from Porter’s classic framework, registered the strongest single coefficient in the entire model at 0.914, confirming that how a bank positions itself against rivals is the decisive lever for translating insight into performance.

The mediation analysis revealed the most nuanced result. Competitive strategy partially mediates the relationship between environmental scanning and performance, with an indirect effect of roughly 0.33 layered on top of the direct effect, producing a total effect of about 0.69. Partial mediation means that scanning helps banks in two parallel ways: it improves performance directly, perhaps by enabling faster, better-informed decisions, and it also works through the deliberate construction of competitive strategies that convert environmental intelligence into market advantage. Organizations that scan without strategizing leave much of the value on the table, and organizations that strategize without scanning build on shaky foundations.

The theoretical scaffolding of the study draws on three pillars. Resource-Based Theory holds that durable advantage comes from resources that are valuable, rare, and difficult to imitate, framing environmental scanning capability itself as a strategic asset. Evolutionary theory, in its dynamic capabilities formulation, emphasizes that banks must continuously adapt and reconfigure their resources as the environment shifts, a message especially pertinent for Ethiopian institutions transitioning from manual operations to digital-first models. Porter’s Five Forces supplies the external lens, mapping competitive rivalry, entry threats, substitutes, and the bargaining power of buyers and suppliers onto the scanning agenda.

The practical implications extend beyond Ethiopia’s borders to any emerging-market bank navigating liberalization and digital disruption. The authors argue that banks should embed environmental scanning as a core management function rather than an occasional planning exercise, and that scanning outputs should feed directly into strategy formulation, a process they note many organizations fumble, with prior literature cited in the study suggesting roughly 70 percent of new strategies fail at implementation. For policymakers, the study recommends that regulators require strategic performance measurement systems, such as balanced scorecards linking organizational goals to operational results, with periodic appraisal cycles to enforce alignment and accountability.

The study is candid about its limits. Its cross-sectional design captures a single moment in time rather than tracking how scanning and performance co-evolve, its reliance on self-reported survey data introduces potential bias despite anonymity safeguards, and its focus on Ethiopian private banks constrains generalization to public banks and other national contexts. The authors call for longitudinal designs and multi-group analyses to test how cultural and regulatory environments moderate these relationships. Still, the central message stands firm: in a banking sector where products are increasingly commoditized, the capacity to read the environment and act on it is not a luxury but a measurable driver of survival and success.

Subject of Research: The effect of strategic environmental scanning on private bank performance in Ethiopia through the mediating role of competitive strategy.

Article Title: Effect of strategic environmental scanning on the private bank performance in Ethiopia with mediating role of competitive strategy

Article References: Didiso, W. M., Ayalewu, B. B., & Yirga, S. A. (2026). Effect of strategic environmental scanning on the private bank performance in Ethiopia with mediating role of competitive strategy. Discover Global Society, 4(1), Article 258. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44282-026-00620-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44282-026-00620-2

Keywords: strategic environmental scanning, competitive strategy, Ethiopian private banks, organizational performance, structural equation modeling, PESTEL analysis, SWOT analysis, resource-based view, dynamic capabilities, banking sector, Porter's Five Forces, mediation analysis

The research, published in the journal Discover Sustainability, was conducted by Harimukti Wandebori, Anak Agung Ngurah Tata Pinandhika, and Bernadetta Nadya Amarani Sitompul of the School of Business and Management at Bandung Institute of Technology. Their starting point was a long-standing unresolved question in the sustainability literature: do the very capabilities that keep small firms viable in volatile markets also move them toward greener practices? Most previous studies could not answer this because they collapsed economic, social, and environmental performance into a single composite score, obscuring exactly the differences that matter most for policy and practice.

The team focused on strategic agility, a dynamic capability that combines two distinct components: market responsiveness, meaning the speed with which a firm detects and reacts to changes in customer needs, competitor moves, and emerging threats; and resource fluidity, meaning the ease with which money, people, and equipment can be redeployed across activities. They also modelled three separate channels through which agility might indirectly influence sustainability: managerial ties with buyers, ties with suppliers, and ties with government officials. Crucially, each channel was specified separately, and each of the three sustainability pillars was treated as a distinct outcome rather than blended into an index.

The survey gathered responses from 179 strategic decision makers in Indonesian micro and small enterprises. The measurement design showed unusual care for a survey study of this kind. Predictor and outcome blocks used deliberately differentiated response anchors so that, for example, economic performance was rated relative to competitors while environmental practices were rated on frequency of use. Two attention check items with prescribed answers were embedded at separate points, completion times were recorded automatically, and a marker variable built from questions about attitudes toward the colour blue allowed the researchers to test statistically whether common method bias was inflating their estimates. Analysis proceeded with partial least squares structural equation modelling, a technique suited to complex path models with modest samples.

The headline result was a clear asymmetry. Strategic agility predicted economic performance with a path coefficient of 0.409 and social performance with 0.365, both medium effect sizes, but environmental performance at only 0.218, roughly half the strength of the other two. Because the outcome scales used different anchors, the team checked the gap on scale-free metrics. On latent correlations, the environmental pillar separated from the economic pillar by 0.229 and from the social pillar by 0.196, with bootstrap intervals that excluded zero in both cases. On the metric of partial coefficients, only the separation from the economic pillar was statistically distinguishable, and the authors are explicit that their title claims only that contrast. The gap also passed a battery of robustness checks: the environmental block showed the lowest ceiling rate and the most symmetric response distribution of the three, which is the opposite of what a ceiling effect or social desirability bias would produce, and correcting for unequal reliability across blocks widened rather than narrowed the difference.

Perhaps the most sobering finding concerned prediction. The model achieved out-of-sample predictive relevance for the economic and social pillars, meaning the estimated structure genuinely anticipated new observations, but it achieved none for the environmental pillar. In other words, the capability-and-ties framework that works for explaining how small firms prosper and serve their communities simply does not contain enough signal to forecast their environmental behaviour. The indirect effect of agility on environmental performance through managerial ties was statistically equivalent to zero against a triviality bound of 0.10, tested with two one-sided tests on the bootstrap distribution.

The tie-based channels themselves fared almost entirely empty. Of the nine paths running from the three tie types to the three pillars, only one, buyer ties to social performance, reached significance at a coefficient of 0.193. The authors handle this carefully: one significant result out of nine tests is a count compatible with chance, and it does not survive correction for multiplicity. They report it as a pattern to be tested in future work rather than as an established mechanism, a level of statistical honesty that stands out in a literature where such a result might otherwise be presented as a discovery.

The study also probes what the gap means mechanistically, and here an item-level analysis delivers a subtle twist. One plausible explanation for weak environmental performance would be simple economics: environmental practices cost money without returning it, so agile firms invest where returns register. If pricing were the boundary, the one environmental practice that pays for itself, reducing waste and resource inefficiency, should attract agility’s influence more strongly than the two that do not. The item-level estimates ordered the three environmental items exactly as that reward-boundary argument predicts, but no within-block difference was statistically distinguishable. Pricing alone, therefore, is not the whole story; the boundary appears to lie in whether a firm’s existing routines register any return at all, and environmental returns rarely do for a small enterprise.

There is an important design caveat the authors state plainly: because a cross-sectional sample contains only surviving firms, the strong economic association is consistent with two competing accounts. Under a capability account, agility genuinely produces better economic outcomes; under a selection account, agile firms simply survive longer and therefore appear in the sample more often. The design cannot separate the two, and the researchers do not pretend otherwise. Nor could the study resolve whether the agility gap differs between resource-rich and resource-poor firms: multigroup comparisons across six operationalisations of resource endowment produced signs that flipped between splits and no significant differences, and a power analysis showed the observed differences all fell below the minimum the sample could detect.

The policy implication, the authors argue, follows directly from the pattern of results. If capability building alone does not reach the environmental pillar, because the returns from environmental practices are invisible to the routines that small firms already have, then progress will depend on instruments that make those returns visible and required: regulations that set minimum standards, incentives that convert environmental savings into financial ones, and market mechanisms that reward green practices through the buyers small firms already depend on. For the vast population of micro and small enterprises in emerging economies, the path to environmental sustainability is not a matter of becoming more agile. It is a matter of changing the payoffs the environment of business, rather than the natural one, currently provides.

Subject of Research: The relationship between strategic agility, managerial ties, and the three pillars of sustainability in Indonesian micro and small enterprises

Article Title: Strategic agility reaches the environmental pillar of small firm sustainability more weakly than the economic pillar: disaggregated evidence from Indonesian micro and small enterprises

Article References: Wandebori, H., Pinandhika, A. A. N. T., & Sitompul, B. N. A. (2026). Strategic agility reaches the environmental pillar of small firm sustainability more weakly than the economic pillar: disaggregated evidence from Indonesian micro and small enterprises. Discover Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43621-026-04788-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43621-026-04788-0

Keywords: strategic agility, small and medium enterprises, sustainability, triple bottom line, environmental performance, managerial ties, Indonesia, PLS-SEM, dynamic capabilities, emerging economy, green practices, business strategy

The OCOP program, inspired by Japan’s One Village One Product and Thailand’s One Tambon One Product movements, has become a cornerstone of Vietnam’s rural development policy, designed to restructure the agricultural sector and strengthen the competitiveness of small and medium-sized enterprises in the countryside. Yet the program has a documented weakness: product lines are frequently undifferentiated, innovation rates remain low, and firms struggle to sustain a competitive presence beyond their local markets. That gap between institutional ambition and firm-level performance is precisely what motivated Huynh Nguyen Tuong An, Nguyen Quoc Cuong, and Nguyen Ngoc Thuc of the Industrial University of Ho Chi Minh City to investigate what actually drives product innovation among these enterprises.

The theoretical scaffolding of the study draws on three established frameworks. Entrepreneurial Orientation Theory, developed by Lumpkin and Dess and rooted in earlier work by Danny Miller, describes a firm’s strategic posture through three dimensions: innovativeness, the tendency to generate and pursue new ideas; proactiveness, the drive to anticipate and seize market opportunities before competitors; and risk-taking, the willingness to commit resources to ventures with uncertain outcomes. Dynamic Capabilities Theory, proposed by Teece and colleagues, explains how firms sense opportunities and reconfigure internal resources to adapt to rapid environmental change. Institutional Theory, meanwhile, emphasizes that formal structures such as government programs, regulations, and policy incentives shape organizational behavior, particularly in transition economies where firms operate under constraints that differ fundamentally from those in developed markets.

What makes the study methodologically distinctive is its unified model. Rather than treating business model innovation and technology capability as separate curiosities, the researchers positioned them as co-mediators, two parallel conduits through which entrepreneurial orientation flows into product outcomes. Business model innovation, defined by Foss and Saebi as a designed, novel change to the key elements of how a firm creates, delivers, and captures value, operates at the level of business logic. Technology capability, the ability to acquire, assimilate, and deploy technology, operates at the level of technical execution. On top of this dual mediation, the researchers layered a moderator: perceived institutional support, the degree to which firms believe government assistance, policy incentives, and program support are genuinely available to them.

To test this architecture, the team applied partial least squares structural equation modeling using SmartPLS software on survey data collected between May and October 2025. Respondents were owners, managers, and senior staff of OCOP enterprises across major provinces of Vietnam’s Southeast region, selected through purposive sampling because no comprehensive public registry of these firms exists. Of 500 initial responses, 480 survived data screening after incomplete or uniform questionnaires were removed, a sample size that comfortably exceeds both the ten-times rule minimum of 258 and the 138 participants required by an a priori power analysis conducted in G*Power. All constructs were measured on five-point Likert scales adapted from validated instruments, including Covin and Slevin’s entrepreneurial orientation scale, Clauss’s business model innovation measure, and Frishammar and Hörte’s new product development performance items.

The statistical rigor extended well beyond the basics. The measurement model showed all outer loadings above 0.70, composite reliability values surpassing 0.70, and average variance extracted above 0.50, while heterotrait-monotrait ratios confirmed that the constructs were empirically distinct. Common method bias, a chronic concern in self-reported cross-sectional surveys, was addressed both procedurally, through respondent anonymity, separated questionnaire sections, and pilot testing with 40 respondents, and statistically, through Harman’s single-factor test, which found the first factor accounted for only 33.028 percent of variance, and full collinearity assessment, in which all variance inflation factors fell below the 3.3 threshold. The model explained 52.2 percent of the variance in new product development performance, with Stone-Geisser Q-squared values confirming medium-to-strong predictive relevance.

The headline result is a striking asymmetry among the three entrepreneurial traits. Proactiveness and risk-taking each exerted a direct, statistically significant positive effect on new product development performance, while innovativeness failed to reach significance in the direct path. Yet innovativeness was far from irrelevant: all six indirect pathways through business model innovation and technology capability were significant at the 0.1 percent level, indicating that creativity works only when it is embedded in reconfigured value architectures and strengthened technical foundations. For proactiveness and risk-taking, both direct and indirect effects were significant, marking business model innovation and technology capability as partial mediators. Business model innovation emerged as the single most influential driver of product performance, with a medium effect size, while the effect sizes of innovativeness and institutional support on the outcome were negligible in the direct paths.

The moderating analysis added a further nuance. Perceived institutional support significantly amplified the effects of both innovativeness and proactiveness on product performance, with 95 percent bootstrapped confidence intervals excluding zero, and simple slope analysis showed the innovativeness-performance slope turning from negligible to strongly positive as institutional support rose. But the same amplification did not hold for risk-taking: although the interaction coefficient was positive, its confidence interval included zero, meaning the moderation was not supported at the conventional level. The authors interpret this as evidence that star-rating promotion standards and market access support do not sufficiently reduce the uncertainty firms face when committing resources to genuinely uncertain product development bets. In other words, government support helps firms be creative and seize opportunities, but it does not yet insure them against the downside of bold bets.

The practical implications ripple outward from the rice paddies and workshops of Dong Nai, Tay Ninh, and Binh Phuoc to the broader debate on innovation in emerging economies. Successful OCOP firms, the study shows, tend to restructure their business models through multi-platform sales channels, e-commerce applications, livestream commerce, and agricultural experience tourism, while investing in preservation technology, deep processing, and automation to improve quality, extend product life cycles, and shorten commercialization timelines. For managers, the message is that entrepreneurial orientation alone is a necessary but insufficient condition; it must be paired with deliberate business model reconfiguration and technology investment. For policymakers, the findings argue for transparent, accessible support systems, financial incentives, innovation management training, and digital transformation assistance that convert perceived support into real innovation capacity. The authors caution that the cross-sectional design precludes causal inference, the single-region sample limits generalizability, and self-reported measures introduce potential bias, calling for longitudinal and multi-source replication. Still, in a program meant to lift rural livelihoods toward the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, the lesson is clear: in Vietnam’s countryside, boldness and foresight pay, but only when creativity is given the organizational machinery to become a product.

Subject of Research: How entrepreneurial orientation dimensions affect new product development performance among OCOP enterprises in Vietnam, with business model innovation and technology capability as mediators and perceived institutional support as a moderator.

Article Title: Investigating the relationship between entrepreneurial orientation and new product development performance

Article References: An, H. N. T., Cuong, N. Q., & Thuc, N. N. (2026). Investigating the relationship between entrepreneurial orientation and new product development performance. Discover Global Society, 4(1), Article 247. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44282-026-00605-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44282-026-00605-1

Keywords: entrepreneurial orientation, new product development performance, business model innovation, technology capability, perceived institutional support, OCOP enterprises, Vietnam, SMEs, PLS-SEM, dynamic capabilities, institutional theory, rural development