Journal article 2025
Management Decision 2025
Projects realize broader benefits from sustainable innovation when actors share a sustainable future and open the project to its surrounding ecology, but innovation can stall when organizations struggle to launch it or remain focused on short-term outcomes.
Sustainability research in projects has often focused on making project delivery itself more sustainable. This study takes a different perspective: sustainability by projects, where projects act as vehicles for generating wider economic, social and environmental benefits. Using the European Space Agency Business Applications programme, the research examines how organizations use sustainable innovation to realize those benefits and which drivers and challenges shape the process across the surrounding project ecology.
How do projects realise benefits through sustainable innovation?
What are the drivers and challenges for organisations developing these projects?
The empirical setting is the European Space Economy and the case is the European Space Agency Business Applications programme. Following a grounded-theory approach, the study analyzes 44 interviews with managers and triangulates them with secondary data. The analysis develops a theoretical framework linking sustainable innovation, project benefits realisation and the project ecology, identifying two drivers, two challenges and the practices and conditions that precede them.
Benefits realisation is supported when participating actors envision a shared sustainable future. This common orientation helps connect project outputs with longer-term economic, social and environmental benefits rather than limiting success to delivery metrics.
Projects can access knowledge, users, partners and complementary resources by engaging with the wider ecology around them. Sustainable innovation is therefore not only an intra-project activity but a process that depends on relationships beyond the temporary project organization.
Two recurring challenges constrain benefit realisation: difficulty launching and scaling sustainable innovation, and a short-sighted view of future benefits. The identified practices help managers navigate these challenges and sustain attention beyond immediate project outcomes.
The research connects two debates that have often developed separately: sustainable innovation and project benefits realisation. It provides empirical support for moving from the sustainability of projects toward sustainability by projects, where projects are understood through the wider and longer-term benefits they enable.
For managers and policymakers, the framework highlights that sustainable benefits depend on shared future visions and an enabling project ecology. It therefore points to practices that can be used to design projects, programmes and policies that support sustainable innovation beyond the boundaries of a single organization.
Paravano, A., Locatelli, G., & Trucco, P. (2025). Projects benefit realisation through sustainable innovation: drivers and challenges. Management Decision. https://doi.org/10.1108/MD-08-2024-1751
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