Sources of information on sustainable innovation: a citation-based systematic literature review and content analysis

Abstract

Sustainable innovation practice is an important step to survive globally in a competitive environment for an economy or business commuity. This study aimed to provide comprehensive insights into sustainable innovation research. To this end, we conducted a citation-based systematic literature review (SLR) to identify evolving trends in sustainable innovation research. We reviewed 747 articles from the major database from 1998 to 2019 to identify an influential journals, authors, articles and trends of keywords. We also performed content analysis (CA) of the most influential articles to identify research attributes, such as sustainable innovation concepts, unit of analysis, data, method, and research themes. We synthesised and interpreted the results of both the SLR and CA to formulate future research directions. The paper reveals that out of various themes, the sustainable business model (SBM) has been the most focused area within the top-100 most influential paper, implying that the SBM is a critical challenge for sustainable innovation practices and quality management. Such a finding is useful for future researchers to understand current trends and explore existing gaps in sustainable innovation research.