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The concept of Sustainability-Oriented Service Innovation (SOSI) has been recently suggested from a conceptual reflection approach in an attempt to integrate innovation and sustainability in services, being an emerging field of innovation in services. This study aims to propose a scale to measure Sustainability-Oriented Service Innovation from the perspective of the company. Because the whole is different from the sum of its different parts, we need to better understand the synergy between sustainability and innovation for the future of tourism companies.

Upon a literature review, we propose a scale and explore its dimensionality with data from 268 to 256 Spanish hotel and travel agency managers, respectively. The dimensionality of the scale for measuring Sustainability-Oriented Service Innovation is similar in hotels and travel agencies.

Five factors emerge from the principal component analyses carried out: two dimensions referred to technological and non-technological innovation, respectively, and three dimensions labelled as economic, social and environmental sustainability.

To guide managers towards their operations, the proposed scale is expected to inspire models to assess the impact of SOSI practices in such a highly competitive industry and to identify the most influencing dimensions on the future performance of the tourism company.

To the best of our knowledge, no scale has been presented so far that brings together the dimensions of technological and non-technological innovation, as well as sustainability from a Triple Bottom Line approach.

The objective of this work is to respond to the calls for research that, in retail and from the company’s perspective, support the importance of retaining a vision towards sustainability-oriented service innovation (SOSI), delving into the nature of this construct and examining its possible antecedent variables (information and communication technologies or ICT) and its consequent variables (volume and radicalness of innovation).

To contrast the proposed hypotheses and respond to the main objective of the research, an empirical study was carried out through face-to-face interviews with 200 managers of retail commercial establishments.

Empirical evidence highlights the important role that SOSI plays in fostering innovative capacity and disrupting innovative practices within the retail sector, particularly from the perspective of store managers, catalysed by the influence of ICT. The findings underline SOSI’s clear contribution to innovation dynamics in retail.

This research analyses SOSI from the perspective of the retail manager within the unique context of the current permacrisis. It contributes to progress in the conceptualisation of SOSI, offering a comprehensive understanding of the construct and its accompanying elements. It provides valuable insights for academics and policy development practitioners navigating the changing landscape of SOSI in the retail sector.