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This paper aims to present a systematic review of the literature on sustainability for the competitiveness of firms to identify the state of the art, significant discussions and new research directions. Recently, due to the negative impacts that traditional and unsustainable practices of companies have caused the Planet (e.g. climate change, sanitary crisis), national and international research urgently calls for the assessment of sustainable practices in firms. However, progress seems slow due to a poor understanding of the necessary changes that companies must make in their specific reality. Competitiveness has remained as firms’ primary strategy to endure. Some have associated sustainability with an increment of costs, sometimes with a negative impact on its competitiveness. Sometimes generating oppositions from stakeholder and institutions regulations, it is important to explore how these behaviors and dynamics of this relationship between sustainability and competitiveness affect the pursued transition to sustainability.

A systematic review of the literature, which is a scientific tool, is used in this research. It allows reliably and accurately analyzing and constructing conclusions from a broad database. The search was leaked over the 10 years, from 2010 to 2019. As a basis, 182 scientific articles were identified and revised based on methodology selection criteria and 51 articles were revised in detail.

This paper identifies critical variables analyzed in the selected articles, sustainability strategies for competitiveness, strategies for sustainability, organizational aspects for sustainability and competitiveness, measurement of sustainability, models, moderating factors for sustainability and new future research directions.

This paper presents state of art about sustainability for competitiveness and identifying key themes and future research directions.

The paper investigates how visibility, information technology and innovation management impact sustainability performance. It proposes a framework explaining the role of visibility in driving firms' sustainable performance and the relevance of innovation management and information technologies in enhancing organisational visibility. This study intends to add to the discussion within the management literature about the potential of innovation management to drive sustainability. It seeks to provide insight into the practices that small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) can adopt to improve their sustainable performance.

Using empirical methods, the study investigates SMEs in central Mexico. The demographic information in the dataset includes 15 years as an average length of service from firms. Of the surveyed firms, 70% were from the manufacturing sector and 30% were from the service sector, as these are the most representative sectors of the productive region. A variance-based structural equation model approach was used to test the hypotheses, processed with the partial least squares (PLS) regression method.

The research results show that visibility significantly impacts sustainability performance. Innovation management has a higher influence on visibility than information technologies, emphasising the need to improve the quality of information in firms, not just the tools. The findings support managers in comprehending the crucial importance of visibility in aiding firms to achieve higher sustainability performance.

The study only examined a sample of Mexican SMEs; therefore, the findings' generalizability must be considered within this context. Secondly, the survey only focused on services and manufacturing firms and a more detailed analysis of the sector could provide further clarity on the relationships between variables. As a result, future research should consider these limitations and explore additional contexts to improve the overall understanding of the topic. Moreover, the scale used to measure the variables was adapted from other researchers with similar context research and reflective variables.

The results provide helpful information for SME managers about the importance of focusing on innovation management processes and employing information technologies as crucial managerial strategies. This will aid in increasing visibility and supporting the development of sustainability performance in firms.

The world red-code, among others, with climate change and social gaps, has generated the need to contribute to sustainable development, and it has mobilised people on all levels all over the world for the simple purpose of preserving life. Therefore, society, as a crucial group that affects and is affected by this red-code situation, should act in favour of visibility, the use of high-quality information (e.g. transparent, accessible and relevant) and information technologies to promote sustainable practices. This could mean that society should be prepared to incorporate new capabilities and spaces to interchange knowledge as a participatory community that can contribute to better sustainable dynamics that could expand its participation in public decisions. Also, the government should encourage digital democracy (e.g. develop social participation platforms), opening and harmonising rules and mechanisms combining high-quality information with IT to provide flexible and adequate services that support sustainable development, such as efforts towards constructing sustainable and smart cities.

This study explores how innovation management can drive firms' sustainability performance, which is crucial for improving competitiveness. The question of how to enhance sustainability performance through managerial drivers is a critical one. This study empirically investigates the nexus of visibility and sustainability performance, innovation management and information technology with visibility.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between organizational ambidexterity, the ability of companies to explore new and to exploit existing processes simultaneously, and manufacturing performance as represented by the sand cone model. Moreover, the paper analyses the impact of stable and dynamic environments on this relationship.

A set of research questions are tested using structural equation modeling on a sample of 231 Spanish manufacturing companies.

Results illustrate a significant relationship between ambidexterity as the basis and enabler for manufacturing performance improvements, building on the sand cone model and its dimensions of quality, delivery, cost, and flexibility. This relationship is further emphasized when companies work in a dynamic environment.

The study contributes to practice by investigating the important and yet under-explored relationships of ambidexterity, the sand cone model, performance, and a company’s wider market environment. Findings suggest a positive relationship between the sand cone model and ambidexterity capability.

This study adds to the limited theoretical and empirical understanding of the relationships between ambidexterity, the sand cone model, environmental dynamism, and performance. It also contributes through a set of empirical data derived from Spanish manufacturing companies.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the adoption of e-banking in Colombia, including a comprehensive analysis of consumer trust in this type of transaction and of the impact of the current government policy to promote e-commerce.

An empirical investigation based on the UTAUT2 model collected data from throughout the country to develop 600 online questionnaires.

The proposed model was validated in that the factors hypothesised to build trust in the use of electronic banking were shown to be significant: trust, performance expectancy and effort expectancy had a positive impact on the use of financial websites in Colombia, while government support did not have a significant impact.

The study explains the antecedents to trust, as well as the government support variable, and concludes by producing a model that is highly successful in predicting financial customers’ online behaviour.

The results can help Colombia’s Government and private banks to further develop trust and other conditions necessary for e-banking.

Studies on the adoption of electronic banking provide users of these services solutions for their needs. Government policies to support the development of e-banking are not viewed favourably by Colombians.

This study is one of the first to present empirical findings on the acceptance of e-banking in Latin America; it further presents a model that integrates the most important variables needed for an analysis of the acceptance of e-banking.

The purpose of this paper is to know if the loyalty of online purchasing is determined by the final perceptions of product quality and brand reputation in the online community of lingerie customers.

The authors used an exploratory model which aspects in previous studies have evaluated satisfaction, loyalty and trust in electronic shopping, in order to examine whether the customer’s perception of the quality and innovation of the final product sold through e-commerce and reputation in the examined was made “Virtual Community” are key factors in creating loyalty. The sample was obtained from a lingerie company which sells its products in Europe in the website leonisa.com, the data were analysed with the software SmartPLS, validating the proposed relationships between customer perceptions on the purchased product and loyalty to the brand.

The results demonstrate theoretical conceptions regarding product characteristics (Quality, Innovation and Satisfaction), and constructs brand (Virtual Community, Reputation and Trust).

This paper presents a case study for a specific brand as exploratory research in the lingerie industry, this must be validated with this type of product for other companies.

This research has elements of support for management, companies will turn attention to the satisfaction of consumers and to maintain goods levels of reputation in the virtual community.

This research shows a real case of the correct implementation of brand strategy, detailing how customers are valued and therefore provides valuable information for customers and companies.

This exploratory study provides a new analysis of product quality factors that were not directly related to the loyalty of electronic purchasing, also, it allows the fashion industry to have elements of support for management and quality control, and that hypotheses relating to the product quality and loyalty in the electronic shopping is confirmed.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether the digital divide has a moderating effect on the technological factors that affect the adoption of electronic commerce.

This study proposes an exploratory empirical model that integrates the basic variables of e-commerce adoption through the use of the technology adoption model, making an extension with the facilitating conditions and the digital divide as a moderating variable. A digital survey was randomly distributed in Colombia, reaching a final sample of 745 electronic buyers.

The explanatory result validates that the perception of the digital divide negatively moderates the influence of the variables related to internet technology on the use of e-commerce.

This one of the first studies that analyzes the effect of the digital divide on the adoption of e-commerce.

The purpose of this paper is to measure the relationship between entrepreneurial orientation (EO) and performance of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The aim is to contribute to the extant literature about the role of EO for SMEs development, and more specifically to identify implications that can inform knowledge-based initiatives of entrepreneurship universities focussing on the development and diffusion of the entrepreneurial culture and capacity.

This research paper adopts a quantitative approach to investigate a conceptual framework linking EO to SME’s performance. The central postulated hypothesis is that EO positively affects performance of SMEs. This hypothesis has been tested by using a system of partial least squares of structural equations modelling, adopting the SmartPLS® 3.0 software (Ringle et al., 2015). The empirical context analysed 170 SMEs operating in the Bajio Region (México) in the leather–footwear sector.

The results provide evidence that Mexican companies that manifest EO have a positive effect on their firm performance. Similarly, findings emphasise that both risk taking and innovativeness are currently the central axes of EO for the analysed companies. Accordingly, entrepreneurial universities should be engaged in the development of EO of students, academic staff and companies by focussing on knowledge-based actions that can foster the improvement of some specific features of the EO.

The results provide insights about the relationships between EO and the performance of SMEs indicating that potentials initiatives of entrepreneurship universities aiming to support the development capacity of SMEs as well as of students and academic staff should be focussed on the critical dimensions characterising EO.

This paper provides insights into the role of EO for SMEs performance. It provides three main contributions. First, derived from literature research, it proposes a working definition of EO. Second, the empirical research findings support an understanding of the relationship between EO and Mexican SMEs performance and propose a multiple and reflective dimension of EO’s model. Moreover, finally, this research provides some implications for entrepreneurship universities aiming to create and diffuse an entrepreneurial culture and capabilities by fostering the development of the EO.

In the supply chain performance measurement (SCPM) there seems to be no consensus about measures for performance evaluation and suitable criteria from resilience and sustainability paradigms. In this way, this research aims to identify the attributes that a supply chain (SC) should follow to be resilient and sustainable, and then to evaluate their importance according to industry experts.

This study suggests a hybrid approach. The authors identified the most commonly used criteria using literature review, and then applied fuzzy Delphi technique (FDT) with the objective of surveying experts to find the attributes used in practice and asked to assess their relevance.

The resilient-sustainable supply chain (RSSC) is formed by four dimensions: resiliency, economic, environmental and social. A total of 15 criteria are identified, and the most important are visibility, flexibility, supply chain risk management (SCRM) culture, work conditions and communication.

This study used a literature review, so it is subject to a time frame, and the criteria could no longer be relevant as the time and business conditions change. Also, the findings may not be completely applicable throughout different industries, and therefore the finding cannot be replicated to other businesses.

This study will assist decision-makers among other interested parties to construct and/or strengthen an integrated SC that mixes resiliency and sustainability.

This study contributes to the state-of-art by producing a characterization of the resilient and sustainable supply chain for the automotive industry. Also, this research produces a new and holistic framework for resilient and sustainable SCPM supporting the decision-making process.

There are several studies about the adoption of e-commerce for small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs) that separately, and in a dispersed manner, examine different theoretical approaches. The purpose of this paper is to unify a set of variables to form an integrated model of measurement of the adoption of e-commerce for SMEs.

Based on an extensive review of empirical studies focused on the adoption of e-commerce in SMEs, a grouped and integrated model of e-commerce among SMEs was constructed. It was built upon the methodology of psychometrics and was subsequently statistically tested for reliability and validity. A broad study has not been carried out. Thus, the small sample size does not allow the estimation of this model’s predictability.

This paper proposes a final model, comprising 14 variables (82 items), grouping the significant effects of e-commerce adoption.

This tool is feasible, offering an initial model enabling detailed examination of variables affecting the adoption of e-commerce in SMEs. It contributes significantly to the development of this line of research.

The purpose of this study is to verify some relationships between entrepreneurial attitude, university environment, entrepreneurial culture and entrepreneurial training, which can be used to promote entrepreneurship among university students.

A sample of 3,005 questionnaires answered by students from ten universities in Colombia was gathered and partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) was used for the analysis.

The results show that the more a student perceives an entrepreneurial culture and the more training he or she receives, the more entrepreneurial attitude he or she will have. Also, it was found that entrepreneurial culture has a positive effect on university environment, and the latter has a positive effect on entrepreneurial training.

The main limitation of this study was that only ten Colombian universities were sampled; therefore, general inferences cannot be made. Additionally, the variables investigated here may have not accurately measured the full scale of the entrepreneurship programmes in such universities or the way the culture of these institutions had a direct impact on students. Projects such as the Global University Entrepreneurial Spirit Students' Survey (GUESSS), which measure variables related to entrepreneurship at the university level, enable universities to shape their policies around this important topic. This study indicates that universities should offer training in entrepreneurial, problem-solving and communication skills to produce entrepreneurs who can better face current challenges.

Other studies have discussed entrepreneurial culture, but they usually deal with university environment, entrepreneurial training and entrepreneurial attitudes separately. This study integrates all these factors and measures the level of interaction between them.