The role of innovation in sustainable development

Abstract

Companies are being challenged to develop new modes of creating value for and with stakeholders, as well as new ways of relating to their technical and socio-ecological. Changes in business models (BMs) are recognised as a fundamental approach to implementing innovation for sustainable development. Nowadays, there is an increasingly urgent need to innovate sustainable BMs (SBMs), which are necessary to make more BMs both sustainable and profitable. Innovation in an SBM can be understood as a way to translate a sustainable development strategy into practical “action plans” for value-creating companies. This chapter will characterise the key trends and changes that are pushing us in this direction, to develop a unified theoretical perspective for understanding BM innovations that lead to better organisational economic, environmental, and social performance. Several collections of literature have been analysed to investigate whether and how BMs can be innovated to achieve the SDGs. It is relevant to understand these elements to facilitate the analysis of organisational processes and the planning of transformation from one BM to another and to increase the resilience and the probability of success.