COMPETITIVENESS, INNOVATION AND SUSTAINABILITY: AN INTER-RELATIONSHIP THROUGH LITERATURE SYSTEMATIZATION

Abstract

The sustainable development growing discussion and the problems inherent to the theme, brings to the fore the companies needs to adapt their processes while maintaining competitiveness. In this search, innovation appears as a key factor, because it enables the  business processes restructuring and the development of new products and technologies. However, the academic understanding of competitiveness, sustainability and innovation has been fragmented. Therefore the aim of this article is to systematize the existing literature in these three areas, seeking to collect evidence of how they are interconnected and encourage  future researches that can investigate deeply the background of these relations. For this, an exploratory qualitative research was conducted through a bibliographic and bibliometric work, which was recorded a total of 379,971 papers in the three areas and their intersections in the period from 1970 to 2015. Among the results, it is observed that, in the short-term, there is a sustainable innovation investment to get competitiveness, either by the benefits of eco-efficiency or the intangible value increase. However, in the long-term, the sustainability problems require investment in radical innovation and how companies could invest in this kind of innovation while maintaining competitiveness should be studied.