BUS604: Innovation and Sustainability

The review approach employed for this study was tempered with a number of conditional criteria, in order to identify relevant documents. These were: time span, language, search database, and search keywords.

Time span: This study was undertaken from mid to late 2018. Initially, only studies/documents published in the period of 2015–2018 were included in the search, as the SDGs have only been active in this timeframe. As the review process progressed, the time period was expanded to include material from 2000–2018, as it was found that some SDG tool types were adaptations of previously published sustainability tools, and that the original publications needed to be identified.

Language: A language specification was applied in this study, with all studies/documents being included in the review process being written in English. It should be noted that some sustainability-related academic research was found to be published in non-English text. The narrowing of the language requirement may have omitted some relevant studies/documents. However, it was expected that most relevant documents would be available in English, and this study was seeking to convey the broad thematic categories of SDG tools, rather than an exhaustive inventory of every possible tool.

Database/Source: The publications/documents considered in this review were sourced from online databases. The databases were Scopus and Web of Science. Together, these are the major bibliometric databases for academic publications, and were utilized due to the significant literature coverage that they offer. Due to the diverse origins of SDG-related tools, Google was also used to source relevant gray literature (i.e., non-academic publications) which may not have been picked up from academic databases. The inclusion of Google as a search method was primarily prompted by the explicit reference to SDG consultancy tools currently utilized by large organizations, which are not evident in academic literature.

Keywords: The search terms used in the review process were initially defined loosely as suggested in the framework of a scoping study. As the review progressed, these terms were reflexively refined to improve the coverage and scope of the search results. The search terms ultimately used were: "SDGs" OR "Sustainable Development Goals", AND "strategy" OR "strategic planning" OR "strategic management", AND "tool(s)" OR "framework(s)" OR "model(s)". For academic papers, the search terms had to appear in titles or keywords, or abstracts. For the gray literature searched in Google, there was no restriction as to where the search terms had appeared.

Using the keywords above returned 194 publications (academic papers as well as industry/consulting reports), which had to be screened for their relevance. The selection criteria were defined as below. Studies were included if all of the selection criteria were met, in order to discard irrelevant studies, and ensure that the operational question for this review was adhered to. The selection criteria were:

• Explicit reference to the SDGs: This was determined to exclude other sustainability tools that make no reference to the SDGs, given that this review was explicitly focussing on the SDGs and not on just any sustainability tool;

• Applicability to a broad range of sectors (that is, sector neutrality), such as: private enterprise, public utilities, etc.: This was determined to ensure that the results of this study would be generic enough to apply to any organization in any sector;
• Developed as a supportive tool/framework for organizations: This was determined to exclude studies that develop tools for the conceptual analysis of the SDGs, mainly for academic purposes.

For academic papers, abstracts were read to determine whether they met the selection criteria. For non-academic publications, executive summaries (when available) were read, or the entire document was quickly scanned.

This resulted in 50 documents that were included for full reading and further analysis. A comprehensive list of these documents can be found in the Supplementary Materials.

The publications obtained from the review process were then analyzed through charting. This process involved each source being analyzed, based upon common characteristics. The Descriptive-Analytic method was used, which includes applying a common analytical framework to all resultant publications and extracting standard information from them. Guided by the aim of the study and the research question stated in Section 3.1 (that is, to understand the nature and purpose of the existing tools), the following common information was sought and extracted, for all 50 publications:

(a) Nature or type of the tool: Was the tool presented in the publication a reporting tool for reporting against the SDGs? Was it a mapping tool against the SDGs? Or something else?

(b) Purpose of the tool: What purpose did the tool try to achieve or help with?

(c) Background to its development: Was the tool developed specifically for the SDGs, or was it an already-existing sustainability tool that had been adapted for the SDGs?

The Results section below reports on the review results, based on the above information extracted from the publications. The following Discussion section then elaborates on the positioning of the tools within the strategic management process.