Social Innovation and Business Competitiveness of Indigenous Oil and Gas Companies in Lagos State, Nigeria

Indigenous oil and gas companies in Nigeria operate in one of the most socially sensitive business environments in the world, where community grievances, host-community expectations, and social licence considerations can determine operational continuity as decisively as geology or capital. Yet the question of whether socially driven innovation translates into competitive advantage in this sector has received limited empirical attention. Anchored on entrepreneurial orientation theory and sustainable development theory, this study examined the effect of social innovation on the business competitiveness of indigenous oil and gas companies in Lagos State, Nigeria, and tested the robustness of this effect in the presence of the other sustainable entrepreneurship dimensions. The study adopted a positivist philosophy and a quantitative, cross-sectional survey design. From a sampling frame of 2,571 employees of five purposively selected indigenous operators, 494 copies of a structured questionnaire were administered using simple random sampling with proportional allocation, and 417 valid responses were analysed. Simple regression revealed that social innovation has a positive and significant effect on business competitiveness (β = .267, t = 5.643, p < .05), explaining 7.1% of its variance. In the joint model with the other sustainable entrepreneurship dimensions (R² = .206, F = 26.751, p < .05), social innovation retained a significant independent contribution (β = .130, t = 2.480, p = .014), ranking second only to resource efficiency. The study concludes that social innovation is not merely a corporate social responsibility expenditure but a strategic driver of competitiveness in Nigeria’s indigenous upstream sector, and recommends that operators institutionalise structured, community-co-created social innovation programmes with defined ownership, budgets, and outcome measures.