The key drivers for managing sustainability-related knowledge: an empirical study

Periodically, new major forces dramatically reshape the business world. Just as globalisation, the information technology revolution and the knowledge economy have been doing for the past two decades. In the early part of this twenty-first century, the most important pressures facing businesses worldwide, especially those in the developed world, is arguably the need for integrating sustainability issues into daily business operations. For businesses, the creation of economic value by integrating corporate social and environmental responsibility issues now increasingly pose real profound strategic challenges. These complex challenges involve numerous processes carried out and influenced by many stakeholders to set the tone and guide corporate level decisions. As organisations try to meet these complex challenges, they need to be innovative. This often calls for the creation, use and exploitation of new knowledge. Therefore, knowledge resources must be properly managed to provide an environment for wellinformed decisions. Much of the sustainability related knowledge evolves around on-going learning from the actions taken by managers and stakeholders who enact the organisation’s sustainability-related change initiatives. This paper primarily reports on the empirical findings of an on-going research study, which is focused on managing change and knowledge associated with sustainability initiatives for organisational competitiveness. The paper focuses on the key drivers that have fuelled the need for managing sustainability-related knowledge. The findings are, in the main, based on semistructured interviews with fifty-nine professionals from forty UK organisations in four sectors – energy and utility, transportation, construction, and not-for-profit organisations. The paper concludes that identifying and understanding the key drivers for managing sustainability-related knowledge is a complex process. The key drivers for managing sustainability-related knowledge as revealed by the current study are to improve accessibility to sustainability-related knowledge, to identify sustainability-related knowledge assets, to improve the flow of sustainability-related knowledge, to build sustainability-related skills and capabilities and to capture key sustainability-related knowledge.