Responsible Innovation and Corporate Sustainability: Opportunities and Challenges

Dear Colleagues,

As the key driving factor for firms to enhance their business value and maintain their core competitiveness, it has become a general consensus in society to promote firm transformation and upgrading and high-quality development by implementing innovation strategies. However, the negative externalities of innovation activities (Mei and Chen, 2016), such as moral and ethical crises (Buhmann and Fieseler, 2021), environmental pollution (Marques Postal et al., 2020), and data privacy concerns (Addis, 2021), have also triggered the implementation of responsible innovation in academic and industrial circles. The concept of responsible innovation was first developed by Hellström and listed as an important section of the EU Horizon 2020 framework plan (Mei et al., 2021). Its key is to require firms and their stakeholders to fully consider the unknown risks and negative effects that may arise from innovation activities while pursuing the commercial value of innovation based on taking into account factors such as business ethics, social moral acceptance, and social expectation and satisfaction. Responsible innovation provides new opportunities for the sustainable development of firms by amplifying and promoting the positive external effects of innovation and reducing or avoiding the negative external effects of innovation. Previous studies have examined the impact of responsible innovation on firms’ innovation activities, social responsibility performance, and sustainable development (Stahl et al., 2019) from the perspective of responsible innovation (Asante et al., 2014) and evaluation tools of firm performance (Gurzawska, 2021). Findings show that responsible innovation makes the division of rights and responsibilities of entrepreneurs more clear, which is conducive to coordinating the formative and summative goals of firms (Lehoux et al., 2020). Meanwhile, it is of great significance for firms to realize commercial and social value, and to maintain a sustainable competitive advantage in the market competition environment. However, during the period of responsible innovation practice by firms, due to the existence of inertial thinking schemes of "efficiency first" and "technology empowerment", as well as development dilemmas such as the decrease in slack-innovation resource, the increase in operating costs, and lower profit performance (even loss) due to implementing responsible innovation (Su and Wang, 2021), responsible innovation faces many theoretical and practical problems that need to be explored and solved urgently.

Therefore, the purpose of this Special Issue is to comprise a collection of empirical and theoretical studies covering a wide range of themes related to "Responsible Innovation and Corporate Sustainability". We sincerely hope that the collection of this Special Issue can provide new insights for firms to better implement technology for good, sustainable, and inclusive responsible innovation to improve corporate sustainability. Submissions that address issues related (but not limited) to the following main topics are particularly welcomed:

1. Driving mechanism of responsible innovation;
2. Implementation mode of responsible innovation;
3. Influencing factors of responsible innovation;
4. Governance mechanism of responsible innovation;
5. Economic consequences of responsible innovation;
6. Responsible innovation and corporate competitiveness;
7. Responsible innovation and corporate performance;
8. Responsible innovation and corporate strategy;
9. Responsible innovation and sustainable development of firms.

Prof. Dr. Jintao Lu
Dr. Krisztina Szegedi
Prof. Dr. Benjamin Lev
Prof. Dr. Changhong Li
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• global reporting initiative (GRI)
• sustainable development goals (SDGs)
• environmental, social and governance (ESG)
• scientific and technological innovation
• social ethics and morality
• technology for social good
• innovation governance
• corporate strategy