BUS604: Innovation and Sustainability

There is a broad consensus that the current trajectory of modern society is untenable. For decades, unsustainable practices have prevailed: populations are swelling, environments are being degraded by human activity and the scourge of inequality remains unchecked. The unsustainability present in the current paradigm is not without acknowledgment, with preventative action occurring at a promising but still insufficient rate. In recent years, this effort has been led by unification around the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Formally ratified as an agenda by the United Nations (UN) in 2015, the SDGs consist of 17 global goals for all UN member states to work towards by 2030.

The SDG framework provides a template for a sustainable future with goals traversing: poverty, health, education, climate change, forests, oceans, and cities. True consensus on the SDGs is difficult to achieve due to the near-universal applicability of the goals, but broadly, the SDG agenda is perceived to be a valuable tool for assemblage; rallying the peoples of the world around a central vision for a better future. The intention of the goals is not simply to provide a shared guide, but to mobilize societal change and channel investments and strategies towards urgent global problems. More specifically, the UN agenda which prescribes the goals states that "bold and transformative steps... are urgently needed to shift the world onto a sustainable and resilient path". The goals were conceptualized as a ground-breaking aspiration, but progress is slow more than three years into the SDG lifespan with the UN reporting that "current progress is insufficient to meet the Agenda's goals and targets by 2030… for disadvantaged and marginalized groups". More directly, the UN states that the current "rate of global progress is not keeping pace with the ambitions of the agenda, necessitating immediate and accelerated action by countries and stakeholders at every level". In other words, gradual progression is insufficient to achieve the goals; a complete paradigm metamorphosis is required.

The transformation required to achieve the SDGs necessitates a united approach from all levels of society. An essential component of the agenda's implementation is the role of the private sector and organizational SDG action. The UN explicitly refers to this role in paragraph 41 of the SDG agenda, stating that "the role of the diverse private sector, ranging from micro-enterprises to cooperatives to multinationals … is important in the implementation of the new agenda". The goals require a vast amount of financing to achieve before the 2030 deadline. Currently, USD 132 billion has been invested into SDG action worldwide, while it is estimated that USD 5–7 trillion is required. Governments cannot possibly fulfill this funding requirement; private sector investment is essential to address this colossal shortfall.

How can organizations engage with the SDGs and work towards realizing them? As the goals are future-facing, any organizational action towards the SDGs requires some level of planning and strategizing. 'Strategic management' is a well-defined academic field that encompasses the processes and tools for the development of key decisions and actions in organizations and their execution. Tangible organizational action of any kind requires integration with the complete strategic management process; that is, when objectives are set, strategies are developed and execution is planned. Therefore, tangible organizational action towards the SDGs would similarly require the goals to be embedded throughout the strategy process. Without such an integration into the strategic management process, SDG actions taken by organizations may remain as trivial efforts, or isolated 'projects', without enabling the organization to deliver consistent and ongoing SDG impact.

To support organizations in engaging with and acting upon the SDGs, a suite of tools and frameworks have been developed by scholarly and practice communities over the past years. Examples include: the new version of the 'Global Reporting Initiative' which includes the SDGs, the 'SDG compass', and the 'SDG industry matrix'. These tools address different aspects in organizations' engagement with the SDGs. For instance, the SDG compass tries to help with visualizing organizational contributions to the goals, while the Global Reporting Initiative tries to help with reporting impact against the SDGs. However, no research has investigated how these frameworks/tools fit within the strategic management process, or if they can enable truly transformative actions. In this paper, we seek to answer this question and identify any gaps in the tools that are available to organizations for delivering fundamental positive impact on the SDGs. We acknowledge the value and usefulness of the tools that are being rapidly developed in academia and in practice communities. But we also contend that in going forward, we need to take a step back, critically scrutinise the existing tools and position them within broader strategy processes in organizations. This will help us reveal any potential disconnect between existing tools and the strategic management process. In this way, we may be able to develop frameworks and tools that can better engage with the strategy process and truly enable transformative actions for realizing the SDGs, before we reach the 2030 deadline.

To deliver on our research objective, a scoping review methodology was used to investigate the existing strategic tools/frameworks that are available to organizations to enact SDG action. These tools were categorized into three typologies in relation to what they try to achieve. The three typologies were then positioned into a generalized model of the strategic management process, to identify where the existing tools fit within the process, and where the gaps are. This study is intended to be applicable in an interdisciplinary manner: useful in practice by categorising some of the key existing SDG tools for organizations, as well as for scholarship, by indicating the gaps and providing a research agenda as new tools and frameworks are developed for organizational SDG action.