Driving sustainable business: the role of open innovation and digitalisation

Abstract

Sustainability, the most pressing challenge facing society today, is reshaping the relationship between companies and society. While companies have long been recognised as major contributors to environmental degradation, achieving sustainability is impossible without them reducing their environmental impact and adopting proactive strategies to protect the environment, all the while remaining profitable to meet their economic needs. To effectively address this critical goal, the factors that can strengthen business sustainability must be explored. To this end, this dissertation, contributing to the literature on corporate sustainability, examined the role of both digitalisation and open innovation in driving sustainability from a business perspective. Digitalisation has emerged as a key determinant of societal dynamics, and sustainability demands system-level approaches that extend beyond the boundaries of individual firms. The dissertation, which includes three interconnected publications, employed a combination of conceptual analysis, systematic literature review, and empirical research. The first publication conceptually examined how digital technologies facilitate environmental innovation through mechanisms such as crowdsourcing, customer co-development, and R&D alliances. Digital tools were found to enhance open collaboration by integrating external knowledge to foster environmental innovation. The second publication, by conducting a systematic literature review of 35 scientific publications to explore the relationship between open innovation and sustainability-oriented innovation, posits an integrative conceptual framework, identifying the key mechanisms, partners, enablers, and barriers in the collaboration for sustainability. Empirically investigating the relationship between business digitalisation and economic and environmental sustainability in Finnish micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises, the third publication emphasises the mediating role of environmental sustainability and the moderating role of company size. This quantitative study indicates that, while digitalisation alone does not directly improve economic sustainability, it enhances environmental sustainability, which subsequently improves economic performance. Digitalisation's benefits were also found to be more pronounced in larger companies. Overall, this dissertation advances the theoretical and practical understanding of how open innovation and digital technologies drive sustainability in businesses, contributing to the fields of corporate sustainability, innovation management, and information systems.