New Roles for Business : Responsible Innovators for a Sustainable Future

In this chapter, we argue that responsible social and technological innovations are necessary to address the sustainability challenges facing people and planet. Businesses are crucial to developing and diffusing these innovations. As we highlight, current research investigates responsible innovation by firms without accounting sufficiently for differences in industry-specific challenges or firm-specific capabilities. However, from the primary sector of agriculture and extractive industries to knowledge-intensive industries such as information and communications technology (ICT), firms face various challenges in sustainable development and possess diverse capabilities that may contribute to resolving sustainability problems. We therefore discuss the challenges of and opportunities for responsible innovation across the spectrum of economic sectors. Based on this analysis, we suggest new modes of corporate governance and responsible leadership that can help to foster responsible innovation. We conclude by deriving future research directions from these insights