How Sustainable-orientated Service Innovation Strategies are Contributing to the Sustainable Development Goals

Even though the private sector plays a pivotal role in the success of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the assessment of the firms’ contribution to the Goals has so far been an underexplored and complex issue. This paper proposes an analytical approach to evaluate the contribution of different sustainability and service innovation strategies to the SDGs. The proposed analytical approach uses open secondary data and content analysis to collect and analyse the sustainability and service innovation activities of a sample of firms. It also develops the Sustainability-orientated Service Innovation (SOSI) Matrix, a tool to map the firms’ strategies and their contribution to the SDGs. The results indicate that the various combinations of sustainability and service innovation strategies lead to differences in the firms’ contribution to the SDGs. In particular, service innovation has been shown to be a fundamental mediator to contribute to the SDGs. The main points of this work are i) the importance of combining sustainability and service innovation to contribute to the SDGs; ii) the development of an analytical procedure to analyse the firms’ contribution to the SDGs; iii) the definition of core SDGs, which are relevant in aligning firm's value-creation to SDGs’ contribution. Finally, the study is based on an in-depth analysis of 23 manufacturers from the fast-growing fitness equipment industry, which has so far received only piecemeal attention in the sustainability and management literature.