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It is higher education’s responsibility to continuously challenge and critique value and knowledge claims that have prescriptive tendencies. Part of this responsibility lies in engaging students in socio‐scientific disputes. The ill‐defined nature of sustainability manifests itself in such disputes when conflicting values, norms, interests, and reality constructions meet. This makes sustainability – its need for contextualization and the debate surrounding it – pivotal for higher education. It offers an opportunity for reflection on the mission of our universities and colleges, but also a chance to enhance the quality of the learning process. This paper explores both the overarching goals and process of higher education from an emancipatory view and with regard to sustainability.

Organization’s core competencies are acknowledged as most valuable assets and skills which contribute to enhance the ability of innovation, the competitive advantage and commercial success of the business. Although several researchers have studied the effects of core competencies on the success of an organization, no enough work has been carried out to investigate the effect of core competencies onfront-end decision-making. Apparel-specific studies in the area of core competencies relating to front-end decision-making are rarely found. Therefore, this paper aims to determine the impact of organizational core competencies on front-end decision-making in the apparel innovation.

A conceptual framework was developed focusing four groups of competencies; technological/ technical, customer, network/ partnership and financial competences and hypothesis were derived. Sixty participants in different companies across Sri Lanka were randomly selected based on their involvement in the front-end of the apparel innovation for questionnaire survey. The data were analyzed using the SPSS version 20 statistical software package. Spearman's rho correlation and Linear regression analysis were used to quantify the impact of the competencies on front-end decisions.

The factors of network competencies are found to be the most influentialon effective front-end decision-making in apparel innovation in Sri Lanka. These results strongly suggests strengthening companies’ ability to interact with partners who possess raw materials, machineries and technology know-how to facilitate efficient front-end decision-making. The next most influential are the factors of technological competencies. It highlights the importance of strengthening the companies’ own technical/ technological competencies to facilitate effective front- end decision-making in apparel innovation.

The findings of this research are of main interest to extend the current understanding on how different factors of organization’s core competencies influence on effective front-end decision-making in apparel innovation. Particularly, apparel domain practitioners will be motivated in implementing and nurturing these important/ and most influential competencies within their firms to facilitate front-end decision-making to achieve better results consistently.