Systematic Review - Network for Business Sustainability

appendix 1: methodology
The systematic review remains a novelty in management
and organization studies (MOS), despite considerable
methodological development drawing on experiences
in other disciplines, particularly medicine. However,
MOS offers a particular context of its own, and, with
an orientation both to be rigorous and to address the
practical implications of the work, we were guided by
the approach first outlined by Tranfield et al. (2003).
The text of the original call asked for a review on “What
best practices drive innovation and intrapreneurship
for sustainable business?” The terms sustainable
business, innovation, intrapreneurship and best practice
are charged with a variety of meanings and have been
applied throughout the MOS literature. To solely use
these keywords to locate sources would result in returns
that would be both unfeasibly large and predominantly
irrelevant. Consequently, an early task was to ensure
that we sufficiently focused the research question that
would guide our review and search strategy to enable
us to deliver a meaningful set of answers to address the
core issues of the study.
Following discussions with the project’s Guidance
Committee, we arrived at the following research
question: “What characterizes the innovation processes
and innovation management practice of sustainability
leaders?” However, after exploring several academic
databases for studies that combined the keywords
innovation, sustainability and leadership, we realized
that the leadership criterion would likely result in both a
very small number of returns and a review constrained
in its practical usefulness for firms beginning the
process of becoming sustainable. That is, by definition,
only a small number of organizations are operating
at the leading edge of sustainable business practice.
These firms are radically innovating across multiple
domains and in some cases are wholly redefining the
purpose and place of business within society. Although
lessons from these firms are valuable, we felt that they
might limit the practical utility of this review for firms
earlier on the sustainability journey. Consequently,
we chose not to focus exclusively on the practices of
leading firms but, instead, to portray how business
can use innovation to progress toward sustainability
leadership. In other words, “How does innovation
make sustainability happen?” Consequently, our
review focused on the following question: What are
the innovation activities firms engage in to become
sustainable?
SEARCH STRATEGY
Our search strategy consisted of looking for relevant
studies in both the scientific literature and among
non-academic (grey) literature sources. The scientific
literature is represented by academic studies published
in peer-reviewed journals. The grey literature consists
of studies, case histories, government, corporate
and institutional reports, practitioner press, magazine
articles, theses and even blogs that have not been
subject to the same critical review and revision that
characterize the peer-review process. Both the
scientific and grey literature offer particular types of
insight for this review.
The process of our search is illustrated in figure 3.
Innovating for Sustainability 67