The Relationship between Innovation and Sustainability: A Bibliometric Review of the Literature

Abstract

The research conducted in this paper is directed towards a bibliometric review and a visualization analysis of the relationship between innovation and sustainability. The main objective is to empirically document the intellectual structure, the volume and the knowledge-development directions. For this objective, we used the VOS Viewer software and the scientific databases ISI Web of Science (WoS). We identify that there is a big increase in volume of articles on innovation and sustainability published in the last 10 years, from 2010 up to 2019, compared to the entire period before 2010. Given the large amount of the literature, we form an ample database of 436 peer-reviewed articles published in the last 10 years. The bibliometric analysis reveals the most influential journals, authors and papers in the studied field. This research reveals that by combining the main aspects of innovation and sustainability in a single concept like “sustainable innovation”, an emerging topic can appear, and it can offer new research directions in the very big field of innovation and in the new and actual field of sustainability.