Exploring and investigating the complementarity and multidimensionality of innovation for sustainability research: Past present and future

Innovation and sustainability are distinct but complementary topics, and hence, complex, multidimensional, and multidisciplinary. It is thus natural that research on ‘innovation for sustainability’, though important, is largely scattered and unstructured. This article aims to rectify this gap by developing a systematic study, quantitatively depicting the knowledge structure and the intellectual progress of innovation for sustainability in the business management literature. To this end, we applied bibliometric analysis to study 1842 innovation for sustainability articles from the ‘Web of Science’ database. Our robust methodology included deploying the document co-citation analysis, co-word analysis, and thematic evolution to trace the intellectual structure and conceptual structure of the innovation for sustainability field. Further, through a thorough qualitative content analysis, we developed a comprehensive conceptual framework comprising drivers, innovation practices, and performance indicators of innovation for sustainability. Additionally, we examined the latest trending articles based on total local citations (TLC) and total global citations (TGC) to delineate the potential future research directions. Overall, thus, this research contributed to the innovation for sustainability literature by combining a tripartite methodology of bibliometric analysis, qualitative content analysis, and analysis of trending articles to determine the intellectual structure and potential future research directions. •Innovation and sustainability are distinct, but also complementary topics, and hence complex, multidimensional and multidisciplinary in nature. It is thus natural that research on ‘innovation for sustainability’, though important, is largely scattered and unstructured.•This article aims to rectify this gap by developing a systematic study, quantitatively depicting the knowledge structure and the intellectual progress of innovation for sustainability in the business management literature.•To this end, we applied co-citation and co-word analyses to study 1842 innovation for sustainability articles from the ‘Web of Science’ database. Our robust methodology included deploying the document co-citation analysis, co-word analysis to trace the intellectual structure and conceptual structure of the innovation for sustainability field.•Further, we develop a comprehensive conceptual framework comprised of drivers, innovation output and performance indicators of innovat