Corporate Strategy and Sustainability: The Role of Digital Innovation in Fast-Changing Scenarios

Dear Colleagues,

The hostile global environment has imposed severe challenges for firms across the world. Organizations have been leaning towards a sustainable development perspective to maintain their competitive position and value in the market. Sustainable development is often described as a social challenge that businesses should be concerned about since it presents opportunities and challenges for enterprises and the surrounding environment (Escobar & Vredenburg, 2011).

Sustainability's relevance is constantly increasing among industrial decision makers, organizations and scholars. To improve sustainability performance, firms must adopt sustainability measures which have been proven to positively affect the overall firm’s performance in several sectors (Neri et al., 2018).

The evolution brought by digital transformation presents various opportunities and new challenges for large as well as small and medium enterprises (SMEs), sectors and regions (Savastano et al., 2019). In the so-called digital economy era, the entire society is facing a rapid change driven by new technological players that have forced the organizations to think out of box and to review their strategies accordingly (Bican and Brem, 2020; George et al., 2020). In addition, the Covid-19 Pandemic has further tested the agility and resilience of organizations, modifying the models driving managerial decisions and organizational practices (George et al., 2020).

The challenges posed by the digital world have a significant impact on social and economic processes, as well as on the environment. Indeed, over the last few decades, sustainable innovation has received great emphasis, involving those technological and organizational innovations that can reconcile economic, social and environmental goals in order to achieve a “win-win-win” situation (Afeltra et al., 2022). This paradigm shift is driven by the interplay between firm dynamic capabilities and the development of structured digital strategies that affect the overall firm performance (Savastano et al. 2021). This approach leads to new sustainable business models based on the adoption of industry 4.0 technologies and practices. The promotion of this new paradigm at different levels (e.g., the EU Smart Specialisation Strategy and its evolutions) generates several opportunities for practitioners and business such as an increasingly traceable and safe product offer as well as social responsibility, which should be considered as key elements for achieving sustainability objectives (Mercuri et al., 2021).

Thus, the multifaceted paradigm of sustainability emerged as a source of success, innovation, and performance results for an unprecedented number of entities, covering the entire supply chain (Lee et al., 2011; Melander, 2018). In the current fast-changing scenario, a sustainable digital innovation perspective is a critical requirement to meet both present and future environmental and economic challenges that the different actors are called to address (Fu et al., 2021; Khattak et al., 2021; Pizzi et al., 2020).

For a long time, businesses strategies have played a central role in achieving corporate monetary interest. Since 1990, the world has shifted interest from monetary growth objectives to sustainable growth across sectors and industries to ensure long-run benefits for all stakeholders sharing a similar environment. However, scant literature poses a need to understand the sustainable development strategies (Singh et al., 2020; Yuan & Cao, 2022) and how these strategies can help promote efficiency and flexibility and drive organizations to excel in their positions and impacts (Wong, 2019). Still, the efforts to accelerate sustainable development have been criticized for presenting limited impacts on managerial and operational practices (Meuer et al., 2020; Lo & Liao, 2021).

The purpose of this special issue is to explore the current scenarios in which firms use unique innovation strategies, e.g., human resource, technological, operational, managerial or transformational, to ensure its alignment with available resources to achieve sustainable development in diverse dynamic contexts. The core objective of this special issue relies in how these strategies, and the capabilities required for them, have evolved and reshaped the practices to attain sustainable development at different levels, sectors, industries, and cultural contexts thanks to digital innovation. (Lloret, 2016; Ludwig & Sassen, 2022). Thus, the main goal of this special issue is to study and explore the existing relationship between digital transformation and sustainability (Esses et al., 2021), its antecedents, and consequences.

We welcome all aspects of business strategies, operations, processes, and extend the issue to both qualitative and quantitative multidisciplinary papers to grasp the dynamic characteristics of the subject in question in different economic and industrial contexts.

Topics in this special issue include but are not limited to the following domains:

• Sustainable Innovation
• Digital transformation
• Digitally Enabled Sustainable Business Models
• Smart Specialization Strategies
• Sustainability criteria integrated at different management levels
• Business Model Innovation
• Digital and Sustainable Supply Chain Management
• Business level and functional IT strategies
• Operation and management strategies
• Resource strategies
• Environmental Social Governance (ESG) Criteria
• Social development (inter and intra-organizational perspectives)
• Environmental proactive strategies
• Technological adaptions to sustainable development processes
• Integrated sustainable policies
• Development of environmental standards
• Identification of key sustainability issues and definition of sustainability frameworks
• Innovative technological and industrial applications
• Institutional focus on sustainable development

Prof. Dr. Marco Savastano
Prof. Dr. Francesco Mercuri
Prof. Dr. Carlo Amendola
Prof. Dr. Bernardino Quattrociocchi
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Administrative Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• sustainable development 
• digital transformation 
• corporate strategy 
• business model innovation 
• dynamic capabilities 
• sustainability 
• innovation