To tackle global challenges, we need to be aware of the complexity of “wicked” problems when contemplating large-scale change. These challenges must be tackled holistically because their various components are interconnected. By drawing on the concepts of sustainability, innovation, and transformation, this conceptual paper explains how organizations have successfully transformed themselves and wider society to foster a more sustainable future, and identifies the difficulties and challenges along the way. The study promotes a strong voice for meeting sustainability challenges for transformative change in a globalized world through business education and practice.

A transition to a more sustainable way of doing business can only be attained by combining technology with profound system innovations and lifestyle changes. The edited book, business transformation for sustainable future ( Sebhatu, Enquist, and Edvardsson, 2021), open up the discussion about a new partnership between sustainability, innovation, and transformation that includes the global society (big world), the biosphere (small planet), and the requirement for a deep mind shift. The book (Ibid) presents cases from business and other service networks including the Base of the Pyramid (BoP) and illustrates how these organizations have transformed themselves for a sustainable future. The research perspectives are macro (policies and legislation), meso (institutional practices), and micro (business practices and individual behavior). This is where research meets real-world business and societal practice. Therefore, this paper is grounded in business research, specifically the interdependencies between sustainability, innovation, and transformation, which makes for a robust basis for describing, explaining, and understanding the complex challenges faced by business and society in the 21st century. 

The paper demonstrates the need for assessing and understanding “how sustainable societal practices can contribute to a broader view of business transformation and vice versa?” in the interrelationship with different theories and different contexts. The concepts and their interdependencies of each contribute to a concluding model. The paper used narratives in a real context of challenge-driven business and societal practices, for instance, in IKEA and EATALY. The paper concludes with implications and future research recommendations of the transformation from “business as usual” to more inclusive and sustainable businesses and the society at large.