Multiple Goals, Attention Allocation, and the Intention-Achievement Gap in Energy Efficiency Innovation

Although improving energy efficiency has many benefits, including not only reducing pollution and climate change but also enhancing productivity and competitiveness, many firms still do not adopt energy efficiency innovation. In this study, we suggest inadequate attention allocation as a barrier to energy efficiency innovation, making firms fall into the intention-achievement gap when they simultaneously pursue multiple innovation-related goals. Due to limits in attention resources, competing innovation goals are likely to divert the firms’ focus of attention away from energy efficiency innovation, making them fail to achieve as much as they had initially intended. In addition, we argue that organizational innovation and government dependence will mitigate the attention dispersion effect of multiple goals by enhancing attention capacity and redirecting attention focus, respectively. We empirically examined our hypotheses in the context of Korean manufacturing industries between 2011 and 2013, using the Korean Innovation Survey 2014 data, and found supports for all hypotheses. In particular, we found that even a small increase in the diversity of innovation goals leads to a substantial likelihood of the intention-achievement gap and that organizational innovation and government dependence help to close the gap, but to a limited extent. Finally, theoretical contributions and practical implications are discussed.