Asia Pacific Business Review

ESG and social innovation have received enormous attention from both pundits and lay people in recent years with many theoretical and empirical publications in leading academic and non-academic journals. Furthermore, the Covid-19 pandemic has also ushered in a new era of social innovation that has fortuitously led many advanced and developing economies to the explosion of digitalized applications that intend to offer social distancing, remote work, long distance medical consultations, delivery services of various daily necessities and others with colossal social impacts including social inclusion, resilience and environmental sustainability (see inter alia, Saul, 2010; Broadstock et al., 2020; Eccles, Kluza, Ziolo and Spoz, 2020; Lee and Stroehle, 2020; Xu, Liu and Shang, 2021).

However, the concept of innovation with palpable impacts on ESG is still underdeveloped especially regarding the theoretical connection between the two concepts (Cohen, Gurun and Nguyen, 2020), the measurement of social impacts for the innovation projects with ESG initiatives (Broadstock et al., 2020; Eccles, Kluza, Ziolo and Spoz, 2020), the lack of motivation among financiers toward social impact investing (Porter et al., 2019) and the practical application of the concept of ESG-driven innovation at the firm level (Broadstock et al., 2020; Li, Lian and Xu, 2023). Guest editors of this special issue have worked on various ESG and innovation related topics including bibliometric analysis of ESG literature (Senadheera et al., 2022); corporate governance reforms (Oh, Yoon and Kim, 2022), sustainable innovation (Lee and Miller, 1999), the danger of digital innovation (Oh et al., 2005) and others. Against this backdrop, guest editors want to commence our new discourse about the relationship between innovation at the firm level and its social impacts in ESG. Particularly, we want to develop theoretical and empirical tools with which we can analyze and predict how innovative performances can be measured in tandem with their contributions to ESG. Utilizing cases from the Asia-Pacific, this special issue wants to invite research papers that address specific issues related to firm-level innovations and ESG based on our broad theoretical outlook presented in this call for papers.

Topics include but not limited to:

• Literature reviews on ESG and firm-level innovation
• Theoretical and empirical research on ESG and firm-level innovation
• Measurement development for ESG-related social impacts
• Social impact investment and its financial innovation including Fintech
• Innovation in ESG-related accounting
• Government regulations regarding firm-level innovation in ESG
• HRM and organizational innovation in firm-level innovation in ESG
• Green technology innovation at the firm-level

All papers will be reviewed in accordance with the APBR normal review processes. Manuscripts should be formatted in accordance with the APBR publication guidelines and all the required content and structure – please look at the website.

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