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Challenges related to sustainability have increasingly become pivotal in the realm of business strategy and innovation. Nevertheless, the incorporation of sustainability principles into business strategies and innovative practices remains a subject of ongoing scholarly debate. This paper aims to undertake a thematic literature review on this theme.

Data were gathered from the Scopus, Web of Science and Science Direct databases. The final sample comprised 85 papers. For analytical purposes, this study adopted topic modeling using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) methodology.

The authors identified five dominant topics concerning the relationship between sustainability, innovation and business strategy. Through a cross-analysis of these topics, the authors theorize that a sustainable innovation strategy encompasses three complementary and interdependent dimensions: capabilities, management and firm. Building on this analysis, the authors outline a research agenda aimed at further exploration and advancement of this theme.

This review enhances the synthesis of research on the theme, prompting reflections on how companies can initiate innovative sustainable actions that align with their business strategy. Additionally, the authors identify specific elements that require improvement to enhance each of the three dimensions of sustainable innovation strategies, such as eco-efficiency, circular economy and the adoption of innovative business models oriented toward services/servitization.

By interweaving sustainability with innovation and business strategy, this study underscores the critical topics that companies and public policymakers should address to support sustainable development at the national level.

While previous literature reviews have focused on the dyadic relationships between sustainability and strategy, or sustainability and innovation, this study extends the boundaries of knowledge by integrating these three concepts into a hybrid theoretical stream.

In a society that encourages consumption, attributes such as exclusivity and social recognition are important in what is intended to be restricted to a certain exclusive segment. Luxury is something that is more desirable than necessary. This study develops and tests a model that analyses the brand loyalty–risk relationship in the luxury watch market.

To test the proposed research model, a sample of 306 international consumers and enthusiasts of luxury brand watches was collected. The data were analysed using structural equation modelling.

The results show that perceived quality has a negative indirect influence on brand risk and brand trust has a strong direct negative effect on brand risk. However, the findings also show that in the luxury market, the greater the affection for the brand, the greater the risk perceived by consumers.

The study was conducted in a single market, luxury watches and the sample includes both enthusiasts and consumers of the luxury brands.

Managers should be aware of the double-edged role of brand affect on brand risk. The quality of a brand and the trust in its promise decrease the risk to the consumer.

This pioneering study is one of the first to approach an underexplored topic as is the case of the risk associated with a brand in the context of the luxury goods market. Moreover, it relies on an international sample composed of consumers from several countries.

This research relied on the broaden-and-build (B&B) theory to explore emotional predictors for curiosity-related differences in daily engagement and contextual performance. We tested a moderated mediation model, arguing that daily positive emotions would be related to daily work engagement and contextual performance.

A total of 586 participants participated in a five-day diary study (n = 2379).

Multi-level modeling showed that, at the person level of analysis, daily positive emotions were significantly and positively related to daily work engagement and, in turn, daily performance. At the daily level of analysis, the mediation model was moderated by curiosity, such that it became stronger for individuals who scored higher on curiosity.

These findings make relevant theoretical contributions to understanding the power of curiosity for daily emotional dynamics in organizations. Compared to traditional between-person variables, these results also expand knowledge on within-person processes that explain daily work engagement and contextual performance. In sum, this study shows that “curiosity does not kill the cat”; instead, it makes it productive.

Embeddedness has gained prominence in entrepreneurship studies. However, the notion that the embeddedness metaphor relates to “market” structures prevails in studies in the area. Entrepreneurship scholars still know little about whether entrepreneurs are eventually embedded in other structures whose relationships go beyond the restricted dimension of the interested actor’s assumption. This study aims to propose investigating the social structures in which a specific type of entrepreneurship, the religious one, is embedded.

The research was qualitative, using interviews as an evidence collection instrument. A total of 17 entrepreneur-pastors responsible for business churches in Brazil and eight parishioners took part in the study.

Religious entrepreneurs are embedded in market structures, corroborating a perspective that associates embeddedness with the utilitarian notion. At the same time, entrepreneurs are embedded in two other social structures: reciprocity and redistribution.

This article emphasizes the relevance of going beyond the predominant perspective associated with the utilitarian and rationalized understanding of embeddedness in relationship networks.

This study makes essential contributions. Initially, it attests to the utilitarian perspective of Granovetter’s embeddedness while suggesting incorporating two other dimensions into the metaphor. By highlighting this, this article stresses the need to reinterpret the metaphor of embeddedness and how entrepreneurship scholars use it. Further, by emphasizing the need to consider embeddedness in networks beyond its still utilitarian perspective, this paper highlights unexplored opportunities for entrepreneurship scholars.

This study aims to conduct a pertinent assessment of the concept of business competitiveness and how Portugal can progress in that field, for the sake of becoming a more sustainable and wealth-creator economy.

The research was elaborated with 65 in-depth interviews with expert persons from the Portuguese business ecosystem, who were asked to reflect on the state of the economy and competitiveness of the country.

There is much room for improvement in almost all areas of activity, in particular by promoting an innovative, value-adding and exporting private sector and a lighter and more efficient public sector. The conclusions point to modernisation of the Portuguese economy as a way of making it more competitive in a highly competitive and demanding global scenario.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, it is the first time that a reflection with experts of the local Portuguese economy has been carried out, especially after a difficult period of COVID.

The purpose of this chapter is to explore the attendance at museums of disabled people in Chile. To address this issue, we propose a logistic regression analysis by type of disability (i.e., physical or mobility difficulty, muteness or difficulty in speech, mental or intellectual difficulty, deafness or difficulty hearing, blindness or difficulty seeing) and severity of disability (i.e., two or more conditions in one individual). We use the National Survey of Cultural Participation in Chile 2017 (N = 12,151), a study whose main aim is to explore cultural participation and the factors that influence disabled people. Preliminary results indicate that only some disabilities negatively influence attendance at museums (e.g., physical disabilities); furthermore, the severity of the disability is also a relevant factor, considering it shows a negative influence on attendance at museums. These results suggest several implications for the infrastructure in museums, as well as repercussions in policies, procedures, funding, and financial management in museums that, if addressed, would foster inclusive environments for all individuals in Chile.

Based on the comprehensive definition of accounting of Carnegie et al. (2021a, 2021b), this study examines how visual imagery can expand and enhance accountability to stakeholders and create room for more human-centric accounts. This study aims to understand how this use can elucidate and prompt interpretations of rhetorical features aimed at envisioning legitimacy and being perceived as accountable.

Following a methodological interpretative approach, this paper draws on a qualitative case study based on a Portuguese charity, the Santa Casa da Misericordia do Porto, from 2019 to 2021, including the COVID-19 crisis period, analysing visual rhetoric in annual and sustainability reports.

The study illuminates how the visual images interact and evoke shared cultural understandings, shaping meanings that can symbolically foster organisational legitimacy and envisions accountability. These symbolic and emotive elements capture and make visible social impacts and reflect broader societal concerns.

The study of visual images within the accounting context can enrich the understanding of accounting as a technical, social and moral practice, while expanding the scope of accountability and promoting a more human-centred approach to accounting. It also adds to the literature on the persuasiveness and rhetoric of accounting and reporting visualisations and on charities’ accountability in crisis period.

Exposure to indoor air pollutants poses a significant health risk, contributing to various ailments such as respiratory and cardiovascular diseases. These unhealthy consequences are specifically alarming for athletes during exercise due to their higher respiratory rate. Therefore, studying, predicting and curtailing exposure to indoor air contaminants during athletic activities is essential for fitness facilities. The objective of this study is to develop a neural network model designed for predicting optimal (in terms of health) occupancy intervals using monitored indoor air quality (IAQ) data.

This research study presents an innovative approach employing a long short-term memory (LSTM) recurrent neural network (RNN) to determine optimal occupancy intervals for ensuring the safety and well-being of occupants. The dataset was collected over a 3-month monitoring campaign, encompassing 15 meteorological and indoor environmental parameters monitored. All the parameters were monitored in 5-min intervals, resulting in a total of 77,520 data points. The dataset collection parameters included the building’s ventilation methods as well as the level of occupancy. Initial preprocessing involved computing the correlation matrix and identifying highly correlated variables to serve as inputs for the LSTM network model.

The findings underscore the efficacy of the proposed artificial intelligence model in forecasting indoor conditions, yielding highly specific predicted time slots. Using the training dataset and established threshold values, the model effectively identifies benign periods for occupancy. Validation of the predicted time slots is conducted utilizing features chosen from the correlation matrix and their corresponding standard ranges. Essentially, this process determines the ratio of recommended to non-recommended timing intervals.

Humans do not have the capacity to process this data and make such a relevant decision, though the complexity of the parameters of IAQ imposes significant barriers to human decision-making, artificial intelligence and machine learning systems, which are different. Present research utilizing multilayer perceptron (MLP) and LSTM algorithms for evaluating indoor air pollution levels lacks the capability to predict specific time slots. This study aims to fill this gap in evaluation methodologies. Therefore, the utilized LSTM-RNN model can provide a day-ahead prediction of indoor air pollutants, making its competency far beyond the human being’s and regular sensors' capacities.

This study aims to investigate and provide comprehensive insights into the state of research on Quality 4.0 across various sectors. The investigation focusses on studies conducted in different countries and is motivated by the perceived benefits of adopting Quality 4.0 and the existing research gap in this domain. The literature review examines two main aspects of Quality 4.0: implementation ingredients and its applications.

This study employed a comprehensive systematic literature review (SLR) and bibliometric analysis of Quality 4.0 publications to identify the benefits, challenges and trends of adopting Quality 4.0.

The applications of Quality 4.0 are centred on six key areas, including agile product development, predictive quality algorithms, cloud databases, automation, reduced cost of quality, streamlined quality processes, accurate demand forecasting and monitoring suppliers and quality metrics using digital dashboards. Geographical disparities in research were identified, with India and the United States of America emerging as the top publishing countries. The dominance of the subjects of business, management and accounting underscored the importance of quality management across diverse sectors.

The limitations of this study include the novelty of the Quality 4.0 topic, which posed a challenge in finding academic material, and the analysis period of six years, which could potentially limit the coverage of recent developments.

The insights and observations from this research offer valuable guidance to academics, practitioners and professionals seeking to implement Quality 4.0 in diverse sectors.

This study contributes a novel perspective to the field by examining the application, utilisation and evaluation of Quality 4.0, providing valuable insights for effectively managing its implementation.