Knowing green to invent green: Dose enterprise internal green community facilitate the green innovation transformation of inventors?

Facilitating inventors' green innovation transformation (IGIT) to bolster the green talent reservoir serves as a crucial pathway for enterprises to enhance their internal motivation for green transformation and attain sustainable development. Guided by social network theory, this study innovatively introduces an informal organizational structure-enterprise internal green community (EIGC)-and systematically examines its multifaceted impact on IGIT from a coopetition perspective. Focusing on the decoupling of social and knowledge networks, this study further explores how EIGC influences IGIT by reshaping inventors' knowledge search and utilization behaviors, and substantiates our arguments using a sample of 669,897 invention patents from Chinese listed companies over the period 2009-2023, which involves 9.38 million inventor collaboration pairs and 4.47 million knowledge association pairs. The empirical results show that EIGC significantly promotes IGIT, and this conclusion remains robust after a series of endogeneity treatments and robustness tests. Mechanism analysis reveals that EIGC facilitates IGIT by increasing exposure to green knowledge, mining mature green knowledge, enabling the exaptation of green knowledge, and identifying non-redundant knowledge nodes. Heterogeneity analysis finds that EIGC can partially substitute for the compensatory function of formal institutions in addressing the knowledge externality of green innovation. Even when enterprises encounter severe green knowledge spillover and patent thickets, EIGC can still provide endogenous impetus for IGIT. Meanwhile, EIGC needs be coupled with a sufficient intensity of external environmental regulations, especially government environmental subsidies, to effectively promote IGIT. This study extends the application of social network structures in the field of green innovation research and provides practical implications for fostering coordinated internal and external drivers of corporate green innovation.