enig: 4th Edition of Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Governance Conference
The sanitary crisis has undoubtedly dramatically challenged the world's economies, and its effects are currently being experienced in all sectors: industrial, medical, aviation, agricultural, tourism, educational, etc. The impact of Covid-19 has significantly reshaped the business models, innovation strategies and marketing policies of all companies. Aware of these economic, financial, and environmental disruptions, the issues of sustainable business model and sustainable innovation become a relevant and central element to be explored and examined in-depth as a lever for the lessons, the new challenges and the potential opportunities arising from the current global crisis. The interest of research on sustainable innovation is rapidly increasing. It is a consequence of social and environmental issues requiring businesses to transform their activities. The gaps in the understanding of what is sustainable innovation as such attracts the academic attention and proposes a new exploratory paradigm. The term “sustainable innovation” has been overused in recent decades, often limited to ecological sustainability and eco-innovation. During the conference, the researchers are invited to widely define and discuss how these concepts are interdependent: sustainable innovation, sustainable business model and sustainable entrepreneurship. Recently, a salient research dilemma emerged in the literature concerning digitalization. Organizations worldwide are increasingly focusing on the development of new technologies to appropriately change their strategies to detect new market opportunities and to better meet customer needs. This trend has been driven in recent years by the implementation of new disruptive technologies, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), blockchain (BC), artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (Caputo et al., 2021). On the one hand, digitalization provides the opportunities to address the challenges of sustainability, on the other hand, the role of digitalization is overestimated. Thus, the ethical issues related to the data protection and misuse of the digital technologies involve such examples as the legitimacy of AI use in recruitment process, technological elitism of developed markets, cybersecurity, privacy protection and others. Certainly, the Covid-19 crisis has significantly accelerated the renewal of business models, innovative strategies and marketing decision-making of all companies, whether they are SMEs or multinationals. Nowadays, one cannot deny that digitalization and technologies such as Big Data, internet of things (IoT), Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence have become critical to ensure the company's longevity and the continuity of its activity (Rahman et al., 2021; Lee et al., 2021; Alanazi & Daim, 2021). The conference call for papers is looking for academic manuscripts that investigate in-depth these changes and implications. In this scheme of things, the special issue of Question(s) de Management is dedicated to the topic of sustainable innovation, business models and entrepreneurship. In this SI we are seeking to publish high-quality research papers assessing current sustainability and future trends in innovation and related subjects. Both theoretical and empirical research papers that deeply discuss the managerial implications are required.
TOPICS
Based on the Post Covid-19 context, we also emphasize the interdisciplinary nature of the issue by explicitly inviting scholars from various disciplines to address the following, but not limited topics:
Sustainable innovation & Innovative Business Models