Systematic Review - Network for Business Sustainability

At the outset of this project, the research team and the
Guidance Committee shared the belief that the grey
literature would make an important contribution to the
substantive review. This belief was rooted in our sense
that although the concept of sustainable business has
a relatively long history, until recently, it has received
little research attention. Thus, we reasoned that recent
activities in the field, including the more cutting-edge
practices, were unlikely to have entered the academic
literature. This view is supported in the literature (e.g.
Winn & Roome, 1993).
This view was reinforced as we searched the literature
through the established academic databases. As we
developed our framework, consisting of three contexts
of sustainability-oriented innovation, we noted the
scarcity of studies that could be allocated to the third
context — Systems Building. We also noted a lag
between the date that a scientific study occurred and
the date of its publication. Of the studies that included
the date of the commencement of the research
(n=35), the average lag from study to publication
was four years (s.d. 2.8 years). Thus, on average, a
study published in 2012 reports on work that was
undertaken in 2008. The practice of some aspects of
innovation may be ahead of the academic research
and, thus, may not be reported in scholarly journals.
Further, as our descriptive statistics show, the SOI
literature is widely distributed and relatively immature:
as yet, it does not have a clearly defined specialist
literature. Because of such conditions, we paid special
attention to compensating search strategies, such
as asking experts about more recent findings and
examining the grey literature (McManus et al., 1998).
Electronic databases can be limited in their usefulness
for searching the grey literature in MOS (Greenhalgh
& Peacock, 2005). Although these databases can
help to identify conference and working papers, they
can overlook informative practitioner literature. So, in
addition to electronic databases, our search strategy
included the following:
• Requests to experts in the field, including:
• Two Academy of Management listservs: (1)
Technology and Innovation Management and
(2) Managing for Sustainability
• Email requests to 218 experts in sustainability
• Internet search of key practitioner websites
including:
• European Commission Eco-Innovation Projects
• FTSE4Good
• United Nations Development Programme
• European Forum for Sustainable Development
and Responsible Business
• United Nations Environmental Programme
• United Nations Global Compact
• World Environment Center
• World Business Council for Sustainable
Development
• Environmental Protection Agency
• Global Reporting Initiative
• European Union Eco-Innovation Observatory
• International Institute for Sustainable
Development
• The Centre for Sustainable Design
• United Nations Environment Programme/
Wuppertal Institute Collaborating Centre on
Sustainable Consumption and Production
Innovating for Sustainability 73