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Sustainable development goals and the climate change agenda are becoming widely promoted topics of research for the 21st century. The role of cities is increasingly recognised as central to investigating these topics. Yet, the field of informal sector entrepreneurship which so many urban entrepreneurs in developing countries depend upon is seldom considered. To redress this imbalance, this study aims to develop a decision model in accordance with institutional theory (IT) and resource dependency theory (RDT) for city managers to deploy. The model identifies and prioritises optimal strategies to address the three areas of sustainability requirements environment society and economy within the study context of Bangladesh.

This study used a mixed methods research design. In the qualitative part, the authors identified the three areas of sustainability requirements (i.e. environment, society and economy) and their corresponding strategies involving the informal sector that operates within the urban environment. In the quantitative part, the authors applied fuzzy quality function deployment (QFD) integrated with the 0-1 non-linear optimisation technique to identify optimal strategies.

The findings show that strategies such as legitimate frameworks, waste management, allocation of urban public space and training programs contribute in important ways to the three areas of sustainability requirements.

The proposed decision model will assist policy-makers and city managers to prioritise sustainability requirements and implement optimal strategies to address those requirements.

Through the integration of IT and RDT, the decision model developed in this study is unique in its application to urban-based informal entrepreneurship in the context of developing countries. The effective application of the fuzzy QFD approach and the optimisation model in the context of urban-based informal entrepreneurship also offers unique contributions to the field of study.

This paper aims to investigate the conditional indirect effect of innovativeness on performance via supply chain agility (SCA) in the service industry at higher and lower collaborative relationships.

The hypothesised model is operationalised with survey data from 245 Australian service firms collected via LinkedIn and analysed using structural equation modelling and fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA).

The analysis found that SCA significantly mediates the relationship between innovativeness and performance. Further, the conditional indirect effect of innovativeness on performance via SCA was significant when the collaborative relationship was high. Results also revealed that a configuration of both innovativeness and agility better predicts performance.

This study is an early attempt to investigate SCA in service industries by scrutinizing SCA from an innovative point of view. While previous studies have demonstrated the role of innovativeness in enhancing a firm's performance, this study explores this link further by investigating the conditional indirect effect of innovativeness on performance via SCA at different levels of collaborative relationships.