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The Aakash tablet was developed as a social innovation (SI) to transform India’s higher education sector. This paper aims to explain the failure of the Aakash tablet beyond the typical explanations of deficiencies in the device’s technical capabilities. This paper argues that an SI lens provides a stronger explanation for its failure than the standard analyses built primarily on the technological viability of the device.

The Aakash project ran from 2010 to 2015. During this period, a number of government and policy reports as well as mainstream media articles were published on the device. Since 2015, a number of academic articles have been published on the Aakash emphasizing its failure as a technological solution. The authors draw on these sources to frame an understanding of the Aakash’s failure informed by SI theory.

Through a complexity-informed analysis, the authors show that the failure of the Aakash stemmed from flawed assumptions and a failure of the initiative to engage with both the particular and constantly changing features of the broader landscape of needs and opportunities.

This study draws attention to failure as a legitimate aspect of the study of SI. In presenting a “counter-case” to the usual success stories, it shows that the SI lens can also explain why an SI does not take off. It thereby adds to the literature on SI and complexity theory through an exploration of the complex interactions among public policy goals, technological advancements and entrepreneurship.

We investigate the integration of the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) into the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI)– based reporting thus exploring the factors that influence the adoption of the SDGs by organizations.

We analyzed the GRI dataset provided by the GRI data secretariat. We analyzed 14,308 reports provided by 9,397 organizations between 2016 and 2017.

Larger organizations are more likely to integrate the SDGs into their reporting than smaller organizations. Secondly, publicly listed firms are more likely to address the SDGs. Thirdly, industries with higher sustainability impacts are more likely to address the SDGs in their reporting. Fourthly, our data confirm a regional effect with regard to SDG reporting. Moreover, organizations that follow international sustainability guidelines and standards such as becoming a member of the GRI Gold Community or using the GRI Content Index services and having external assurance are more likely to report on the SDGs.

Corporations play an essential role in the achievement of the SDGs, which shape the future of the world's sustainable development. Nevertheless, SDGs reporting needs more research to analyze the factors that can influence it. The study contributed to the academic literature on CSR and legitimacy theory by analyzing institutional and regional factors that impact SDGs reporting.

The study provides insights about the integration of the SDGs into organizational reporting and accounting, including the adoption of the SDGs by small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and the benefits of the SDGs as a framework for strategic corporate sustainability.

A global sustainability framework, such as the SDGs can be integrated into organizations sustainability reporting and accounting in a meaningful way.

This is the first study that analyzes the integration of the SDGs into GRI-based reporting. The study contributes to legitimacy theory by highlighting the factors, which contribute to the legitimacy-based adoption of the SDGs, including organizational size, being publicly listed, being from high-impact industries and certain global regions, etc. SDG reporting can help firms increase their organizational legitimacy across their stakeholders.

When complex social-ecological systems collapse and transform, the possible outcomes of this transformation are not set in stone. This paper aims to explore the role of social imagination in determining possible futures for a reformed system. The authors use a historical study of the Luddite response to the Industrial Revolution centred in the UK in the early-19th century to explore the concepts of path dependency, agency and the distributional impacts of systems change.

In this historical study, the authors used the Luddites’ own words and those of their supporters, captured in archival sources (n = 43 unique Luddite statements), to develop hypotheses around the effects on political, social and judicial consequences of a significant systems transformation. The authors then scaffolded these statements using the heuristics of panarchy and basins of attraction to conceptualize this contentious moment of British history.

Rather than a strict cautionary tale, the Luddites’ story illustrates the importance of environmental fit and selection pressures as the skilled workers sought to push the English system to a different basin of attraction. It warns us about the difficulty of a just transition in contentious economic and political conditions.

The Luddites’ story is a cautionary tale for those interested in a just transition, or bottom-up systems transformation generally as the deep basins of attraction that prefer either the status quo or alternate, elite-favouring arrangements can be challenging to shift independent of shocks. While backward looking, the authors intend these discussions to contribute to current debates on the role(s) of social innovation in social and economic policy within increasingly charged or polarized political contexts.

Social innovation itself is often predicated on the need for just transitions of complex adaptive systems (Westley et al., 2013), and the Luddite movement offers us the opportunity to study the distribution effects of a transformative systems change – the Industrial Revolution – and explore two fundamental questions that underpin much social innovation scholarship: how do we build a just future in the face of complexity and what are likely forms those conversations could take, based on historical examples?

This study aims to evaluate the awareness level of Islamic finance principles among employees of financial institutions in Moscow, Russia.

A quantitative method is used with a Likert scale questionnaire. A survey was conducted to 310 financial institutions’ employees to determine the level of their awareness of major Islamic finance principles. The sample population is selected using the judgment sampling technique. A descriptive analysis with frequency, percentage and weighted mean are used to analyze the data.

The study finds that the level of awareness of financial institutions’ employees towards Islamic finance is low. This is probably due to the minority of the Muslim population and geographically far from to the countries where Islamic finance is being implemented. All respondents have a good education background, thus implementing some training sessions for its employees or hiring some outside specialists could transfer the knowledge and widespread the adoption of Islamic finance instruments.

The academic institutions such as universities in Russia could play a pivotal role to offer Islamic finance-related subjects, while the government as a regulatory body, should support the Islamic finance initiatives.