Co-creation of Social Innovation: Corporate Universities as Innovative Strategies for Chinese Firms to Engage with Society

Corporate social innovation is a novel, strategic means for enterprise to establish competitive advantage through collaboration with powerful stakeholders, like governments, where firms are simultaneously able to meet social needs and benefit themselves. There is, however limited empirical research investigating how such collaboration enables the co-creation of innovation between firms and society, particularly in emerging markets. In response, this paper takes corporate universities (CUs), a typical manifestation of corporate social innovation, as an example, and explores whether CUs encourage employees to engage in innovation and pro-environmental behaviors, thereby contributing to their firms and local communities in China. Using quantitative methods, we found that employees’ participation in CU training/education courses significantly affects employees’ innovation and environmentally-friendly behaviors in both work and life, and that it enhances their normative commitment (NC) to organizations. Moreover, this commitment mediates employees’ participation in the university program, in terms of both their innovation and pro-environmental behaviors. The main contribution of this paper is to enrich the innovation literature by suggesting a fresh, co-creation mechanism of social innovation between enterprise and government, while offering valuable first-hand evidence in a non-Western context. Our results allow policy makers and stakeholders to gain an in depth understanding of relevant issues.