Does Understanding the Sustainable Development Concept Affect the Leaders’ Innovative Competencies?

It is traditionally considered that the innovative ability or activity of small and medium-sized enterprises has become an important factor influencing the sustainability of their development in conditions of constant fluctuations. A new formulation of the research goal is to solve the inverse problem and prove the existence of an inverse relationship—the dependence between the innovative ability of the leader or manager of the small and medium-sized business (an important factor in the innovative activity of the company) and his or her comprehension of the sustainable development concept. As the basic methodology of the research, the authors took the innovation-cyclical paradigm of sustainable development and an econometric approach, which makes it possible to quantify the cause-effect relations between the parametric characteristics of the analyzed processes. The research result, which determined the list of elements of scientific novelty and its practical importance, is the econometric (correlation-regression) model developed by the authors using the entropic method of data analysis, the experiments with which make it possible to give a clear answer to the question formulated as the main goal—whether understanding of the sustainable development concept affects the leaders’ innovative competencies. The developed model makes it possible to reveal the existence of the required dependence “innovative ability of the chief—comprehension of the sustainable development concept” and forms a ready practical basis for the integration of sustainability (ESG) principles into organizations of various spheres of economic activity that raises its relevance and practical value.