This interview study shows how individual beliefs, as building blocks of individual behaviour, are related to moving beyond business-as-usual towards sustainable business practices. A classification system of beliefs – ‘action logics’ – is useful to understand the beliefs of sustainability managers. Our study asserts that the action logics of strategist and alchemist are most suitable for effecting a corporate sustainability transformation. The study looked at senior managers in the German clothing and textile industry, covering all market segments.

The content-focused ‘learning from’ and alliance partner-specific ‘learning about’ are both important. Our study looked at a European meat producer and wholesaler [turnover $2.7bn in 2019/2020] wanting to innovate in the protein space. We found that ‘learning about’ and ‘learning from’ merge when it comes to learning alliances that aim to further sustainability innovation. READ MORE

This study about a clothing retailer links lean startup thinking, triple bottom line value creation, and organizational capabilities. The retailer pursues the goal of diverting all of its sold clothing from landfill through a two-year project. This requires substantial changes to the current business practice because the retailer recovered only 1% of all garments sold at the beginning of the study. The fibre input value for all garments sold exceeded $7m. The desire to plan project activities and the lack of lean startup experience in the project team hampered fast action. But project team confidence about ‘learning by doing’ increased through privately executed experiments. READ MORE

This conceptual publication proposes 6 archetypes of Change Agents for Sustainability. We present competencies for each of the 6 archetypes and summarise, in a framework, the key activities through which Change Agents for Sustainability can drive organisational change toward sustainability. READ MORE

This book chapter links ‘ethical leadership’ with ‘sustainable innovation’. This conceptual link helps to clarify how business leaders might overcome innovation challenges. The chapter proposes balances that need to be considered by leaders during the pursuit of sustainable innovation. For example, ‘Thriving to pursue sequential learning to reduce uncertainty’ must be balanced with ‘Taking action in the face of uncertainty’. READ CHAPTER