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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Sustainable Innovation as Competitive Advantage in the Era of Sustainability

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The challenges that sustainability raises in front of companies are nowadays bigger than ever, as their actions and performances are increasingly scrutinized and evaluated (by a plethora of different stakeholders) against a variety of sustainability-related expectations and standards. The paper aims to explore the universe of the most sustainable corporations—based on an analysis that corroborates these companies’ engagements towards sustainability (as declared on their websites) with their sustainability-related performances (as reflected in their scores—based on relevant KPIs—according to Corporate Knights’ Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations)—in order to find relevant insights on the ways these companies have managed to overcome the challenges of sustainability. The results suggest that sustainable innovation is starting to crystallize as the main competitive advantage of these companies—which demonstrates not only that the challenges of sustainability can be overcome, but also that they can be transformed into opportunities and capitalized on as sources of (sustainable) competitive advantage.