The term 'sustainable innovation' generally denotes technological change where either the process of innovation, or its outcome, adheres to normative criteria related to sustainable development. While researchers and practitioners of sustainable innovation implicitly posit the unique nature of this form of innovation in comparison with innovation in general, there is an incomplete understanding of what constitutes this uniqueness. To understand the diverse articulations of this uniqueness this chapter takes a natural language processing approach to identify distinct lineages of academic literature which are then qualitatively interpreted. We find that the term 'sustainable innovation' is used in a fragmented set of lineages, where the fragmentation stems in part from a focus on different dimensions of sustainability. Lineages are also seen to define sustainability as a specific topical area within various strands of innovation studies, thus replicating the structure of the wider field in a specific area of application.
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Front Matter
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Part I: VISIONS OF INNOVATION
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Part II: THEORIZING INNOVATION IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: THE FOUNDATIONS
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Part III: ALTERNATIVE APPROACHES TO INNOVATION
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Part IV: ALTERNATIVE TYPES OF INNOVATION
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Part V: SUPPORTING INNOVATION: REFRAMING THE INSTRUMENTS
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Part VI: IMMUNE DISCIPLINES AND FORGOTTEN THEORIZATIONS
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Part VII: THEORIZING THE THEORIES
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Back Matter
