Sustainable product innovation in agri-food industry: Do ownership structure and capital structure matter?

Sustainable product innovation is a key issue facing agri-food companies to maintain and increase their com-petitiveness. Based on a sample of 320 international agri-food companies for the period 2002-2017, this paper analyzes the role that ownership structure and capital structure play with regard to sustainable prod-uct innovation as well as whether these financing decisions differ depending on the firm's ownership struc-ture. The results indicate that family-owned firms show an aversion to this type of eco-innovation projects, regardless of their source of financing. On the contrary, ownership by cross-holdings favors investment in sustainable product innovation projects, showing a greater preference for the use of debt financing versus auto-financing to fund them.(c) 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Espana, S.L.U. on behalf of Journal of Innovation & Knowledge. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)