Abstract
The increasingly negative effects of climate change are caused by humans and can be solved only by humans. In the past two decades, researchers have conducted considerable studies devoted to the human side of sustainable innovation. The present work aimed to provide a structured overview of these studies in the frame of the Special Issue: The Human Side of Sustainable Innovations. In contrast to the concepts capturing the human side, the definitions and operationalizations of sustainability and sustainable innovations are considerably ambiguous. We identified six journals that exemplify three factors on the human side of sustainable innovation and elucidate the concept. For their findings to be conclusive, researchers need to engage in significant efforts in investigating the differences in the interpretation and recognition of sustainability, in establishing consensus on the sustainable behavior of actors, and in executing comparable studies and experiments. Moreover, future research needs to establish generally accepted evaluations and measurements of sustainability.
Highlights
Since the Brundtland Report in 1987 [1], global awareness of the sustainability issue has increased exponentially
The UN developed and established 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that acknowledge the economic, social, and environmental challenges faced by nations [2]
As members of new product development (NPD) or research and development (R&D) teams, people innovate while performing their tasks in academic and business institutions and other start-up enterprises on sustainable innovations
Summary
Since the Brundtland Report in 1987 [1], global awareness of the sustainability issue has increased exponentially. We examined more than 3,000 journal articles This explorative analysis aimed at extracting all prominent terms capturing the human side linked to sustainable innovation. Other words for all the terms that characterize or are prescribed to humans, terms that describe humanto-human interaction and the aggregated variables resulting from them, and all variables that measure interventions for human behavior or human-to-human interaction were considered and extracted This bibliometric analysis generated a rough overview of the number of publications referring to the human side of sustainable innovation, as well as their distribution in the selected journals. The last two sections interlink all articles published in the Special Issue to our bibliometric analysis, and present the conceptualization of the human side and a discussion of sustainable innovations.
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