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Corporations increasingly subscribe to the principles of corporate sustainability, which is generally described as the integration of economic, environmental and social dimensions. Concerning innovation management, this emphasises the role of sustainability-oriented innovations (SOI). SOI is considered a tool both to address sustainability issues and to tap into new customer segments and markets. Yet SOI are very risky: both their market success and non-economic sustainability are uncertain. This paper presents a generic model termed the "Sustainability Innovation Cube" (SIC) for structuring innovations' sustainability effects in order to better inform corporate decision-makers about how to minimize the directional risk of SOI. The model includes the three dimensions: target, life cycle and innovation type. A qualitative expert study reveals the opportunities and challenges related to the developed model. Finally, practical implications are derived, limitations are discussed and a brief outlook is given.

The relevance of business models for corporate performance in general and corporate sustainability in particular has been widely acknowledged in the literature while sustainable entrepreneurship research has started to explore contributions to the sustainability transformation of markets and society. Particularities of the business models of sustainable niche market pioneers have been identified in earlier research, but little is known about the dynamic role of business models for sustainable entrepreneurship processes aiming at upscaling ecologically and socially beneficial niche models or sustainability upgrading of conventional mass market players. Informed by evolutionary economics, we develop a theoretical framework to analyze co-evolutionary business model development for sustainable niche pioneers and conventional mass market players aiming at the sustainability transformation of markets. Core evolutionary processes of business model variation, selection and retention, and evolutionary pathways are identified to support structured analyses of the dynamics between business model innovation and sustainability transformation of markets.

The increasing strategic importance of environmental, social, and ethical issues as well as related performance measures has spurred interest in corporate sustainability performance measurement and management systems. This paper focuses on the balanced scorecard (BSC), a performance measurement and management system aiming at balancing financial and nonfinancial as well as short and long-term measures. Modifications to the original BSC which explicitly consider environmental, social, or ethical issues are often referred to as sustainability balanced scorecards (SBSCs). There is much scholarly discussion about SBSC architecture and how it can be designed to relate performance dimensions, strategic objectives, and the logical links among these elements. To synthesise the widely scattered research findings and publications on the SBSC, we conducted a thematic analysis in a systematic literature review containing 69 relevant articles spanning a period of two decades.We found that sustainability-oriented modifications of the BSC architecture are motivated by instrumental and social/political to normative theoretical perspectives. Moreover, these modifications can be mapped with a typology of generic SBSC architectures. The first dimension of the typology describes the hierarchy between performance perspectives and strategic objectives and how it is related to the organisational value system. The second dimension describes how sustainability-related strategic objectives are integrated into SBSC performance perspectives and how this is related to corporate sustainability strategy. This study contributes to the development of the emerging SBSC literature and practice and, more generally, to research on corporate sustainability performance measurement and management. We conclude with a research agenda and implications for management.

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Companies which manage global supply chains face a high level of complexity with a large number of suppliers in diverse socio‐economic contexts and growing expectations of customers and standardization schemes to control social and environmental aspects. In the context of sustainable development, the effective management of supplier relationships has therefore attracted particular attention in sustainable supply chain management (SSCM). This paper investigates two SSCM strategic approaches in Germany's largest stock companies with regard to supplier management. Supplier evaluation and selection adopts a risk‐oriented strategic perspective whereas supplier development represents a business‐opportunity‐oriented approach to managing supplier chains for sustainable products. The survey‐based analysis reveals that large German stock companies mainly implement risk‐oriented SSCM strategies. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment

Sustainability challenges are complex. So are the challenges that business firms encounter in their corresponding quest for corporate sustainability. Given this complexity, there is a need for new approaches to corporate sustainability management research. We discuss transdisciplinarity as such a novel approach in three steps. After showing that specialization is the primary conventional response to increasing complexity, we first briefly compare how inter‐, multi‐ and transdisciplinarity reintegrate decentralized, specialized knowledge. The second step describes how the emerging sustainability science has recently advanced the transdisciplinary methodology. Based on the two dimensions of interdisciplinarity and academia–practice collaboration, we third generate a framework for mapping existing research approaches in terms of their transdisciplinary qualities. We use this framework to identify room for novel methodologies in sustainability management research. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.