“…Temporal aspects are especially inherent to grand challenges, as they involve multiple time frames (Ferraro et al, 2015), imply a trade-off of todays' consumption and future generation's needs (Brundtland, 1987), and require actions today that will only materialize in the future. Given this temporal aspect of grand challenges on the one hand, and the outstanding role of Chief Executive Officer (CEO) as chief cognizer (Nadkarni and Chen, 2014) and decision-making authority (Ahmad et al, 2023;Ali et al, 2022;Naseem et al, 2020) that have been shown to play a vital role in explaining the variety of environmental responses (Lewis et al, 2014) on the other hand, we expect CEOs' orientation towards time to affect firms' awareness and hence identification of grand challenges as well as their subsequent interpretation. We utilize the example of water scarcity as a grand challenge and investigate the relationship between CEOs' temporal focus and firms' identification and interpretation of the grand challenge as an opportunity.…”