How Social Responsibility Influences Innovation of Service Firms: An Investigation of Mediating Factors

The purpose of this study is to extend research on corporate social responsibility and to emphasise the role of this concept on innovation performance of service firms using mediators such as customer collaboration, employee collaboration, and business partners’ collaboration. This will help identifying the opportunities to improve the innovation capacity of firms. The results indicate that collaboration relationships played a partially mediating role. It acts as significant intermediate variables between social responsibility and innovation performance of service firms. The findings fill a gap in the literature by demonstrating how social responsibility initiatives influence the collaboration mechanisms of the firms through its positive effects on the collaboration between customers, employees, and business partners. They could also lead to the increase of their innovation potential. The managers of the firms using limited resources can stimulate indirectly the innovation by stimulating social responsibility initiatives because these have a multiplicative role in increasing the service firms’ innovation potential.