Sustainability innovation systems (SIS): IT Investments and Stages of Sustainability Maturity

We synthesize a new longitudinal framework for investing in IT assets to support sustainability and to prescribe specific investments for each stage of sustainability. This framework provides an IT investment plan for organizations that supports the five stages of sustainability and will positively moderate the relationship between an organization’s ability to traverse the stages of sustainability and organizational innovation. We propose that there is an innovation payoff at each stage and support that proposition with exemplars from the literature. To highlight their key role in supporting sustainability driven innovation, we choose to call these IT investments Sustainability Innovation Systems (SIS).