Linking Process Innovation Maturity to Sustainability: Insights from a Systematic Literature Review

Sustainability has become an evolving paradigm within academia. This emergence has led organizations to innovate their business processes to remain competitive, meet customer expectations regarding sustainability, and comply with governmental regulations to achieve sustainability goals. This necessitates organizations to innovate their business processes beyond being profit-oriented. However, knowledge about the pathways of succeeding a sustainable process innovation is currently limited. Considering capability areas and business process maturity models (MMs) as key roles in a process innovation’s pathway, this paper emphasizes the scarcity of existing sustainability measurement items for assessing and innovating business processes, highlighting the need for clearer guidance. We provide a systematic literature review (SLR) to explore the current state of literature and evaluate the progression of a related maturity quantification. Finally, our research unveils the interplay between the triple bottom line (TBL) sustainability dimensions (i.e., ecology, economy, and social), emphasizing the need for extending beyond profit-oriented business process innovation. Our insights call for integrating the sustainability dimensions to facilitate maturity when prioritizing BPM investments based on configuration theory.