Investigating the Impact of ‘green’ Information Technology Innovators on Firm Performance

The purpose of our study is to test the robustness of innovation theory. Today, many companies are ‘going green’ to respond to the demand from government, consumers, and general public and also to improve competitiveness. To investigate if information technology (IT) innovators achieve competitive advantage even after going green, we first selected IT innovators using the most recent Information Week 500 annual data sets and then selected companies that are environmentally conscientious (green). Using ‘matched sample comparison group’ methodology, we compared green IT innovators’ performance against their industry average performance and also with performance of green IT followers that are going green but not IT innovators. We found that performance of green IT innovators was significantly better than their industry benchmark firms and also green IT followers.