Sustainable Innovation and the Triple Bottom Line: Value, Actors, Technologies

Sustainability, as a philosophy, theory, and practice, has infiltrated essentially every aspect of our lives, creating a flood of focused, multi-perspective, and cross-disciplinary scholarly and professional works on the subject. In spite of the significant extant volume of research on the subject – or perhaps because of it – sustainability remains an elusive notion with multiple interpretations and conceptualisations, each depending on the context and viewpoint of the research at hand. This rather natural phenomenon calls not for its elimination but rather for its refinement in order to interpret and comprehend sustainability correctly through its appropriate contextual positioning. In this vein, the present chapter constructs a theoretical foundation for sustainability against two critical factors: technology and innovation, on the one hand, and business and the triple bottom line, on the other hand.