The importance of business practices to solve present sustainability issues, such as climate change, environmental degradation, and social inequalities has been emphasized in literature for quite some time (Elkington 1992; Hart and Prahalad 2002; Yunus and Weber 2007; Porter and Kramer 2011). From a business perspective, the areas of corporate sustainability, corporate responsibility, and corporate social responsibility (CSR) all seek to address these issues by transcending the core responsibilities of businesses (i.e., to make profits) to noneconomic (or better pre-economic) aspects such as ecological and social responsibilities. This notion is frequently addressed as the “ Triple Bottom Line” (TBL) (Elkington 1992).

While the last decades of research in sustainability (and particularly the environmental dimension) has focused on improvements on the levels of processes (e.g., eco-efficient production; health and safety) and the organization (e.g., environmental management systems, codes of conduct), scholars have lately emphasized putting sustainability at the core of a corporation’s value creation activities (Louche et al. 2010) and thus products and services (Hart 1997; Maxwell and Van der Vorst 2003). Consequently, innovations are perceived to play a paramount role in the area of corporate sustainability (Hart and Milstein 2003; Hockerts and Morsing 2008), and, going even further, the business case of sustainability-oriented innovation activities is increasingly acknowledged (Hockerts and Wüstenhagen 2010). In the present entry, it is thus understood that sustainable development can be advanced through market mechanisms, specifically, through the diffusion of more sustainable product (or service) offerings.

In recent years, research in the area of sustainability-oriented innovation (SOI) has increasingly emerged and addressed the theme from different vantage points: Research on eco-innovation (Rennings 2000) and social innovation (Deiglmeier and Miller 2008) focus on one specific dimension of SOI. It is often established organizations – both large scale corporations as well as small and medium-sized enterprises – in which SOI is considered an important concept for the transformation of an organization’s product offerings. In contrast, the concepts of ecopreneurship, social entrepreneurship, and sustainable entrepreneurship highlight the importance of new firms and start-ups to spur sustainable development through Schumpeter’s mechanisms of “creative destruction” (Schaltegger 2002; Hall et al. 2010; Schaltegger and Wagner 2011). In a broad sense as applied here, all these innovation endeavors – independent of the actual firm specifics – can be considered SOI.