Leadership, innovation, and performance are essential factors to achieve the desired sustainable profitability of companies. The relationship between these variables is one of the keys to organizational success, although their study has proven to be complex. The purpose of this chapter is to analyse the impact of leadership on the relationship between innovation and performance in the Portuguese hotel sector. To answer this challenge, a survey was carried out to top and middle managers of four-star and five-star hotel units.

The existence of a positive correlation between innovation and performance was found; however, leadership has not been shown to have a moderating effect on the relationship. The work highlights several important contributions to the hotel industry and identifies aspects that, when well implemented and developed, can lead to superior performance in organizations.

The instrumental role of projects in the transition of organisations and society towards sustainability requires that the concepts of sustainability are considered in projects and project management. Within a project’s organisation, the project manager and the project owner bear the most responsibility for integrating sustainability into the execution, management, and governance of the project. The project owner is expected to translate the organisation’s commitment to sustainability into the assignment and governance of the project. However, several factors influence the behaviour of project owners, of which the organisation’s strategy is only one.

Following the studies that explored the stimulus of project managers to consider or address sustainability, this study explored the factors that influence the project owner’s behaviour with regard to addressing sustainability in assigning and governing a project. A survey-based study with quantitative data analysis identified three factors that stimulate the project owners to address sustainability in assigning and governing projects: Organisational attitude, Private attitude, and Practical implementation. Of these factors, Practical implementation and Organisational attitude have the most influence.

The importance of the Practical implementation factor highlights the need for practical, applicable tools and instruments that support the implementation of sustainability into projects and project management. The strong orientation on the organisational context may be explained by the managerial responsibility that project owners often have. The study contributes to the further understanding of how organisations can realise their transition to a sustainable enterprise.

SMEs are a significant portion of global corporations and, while individually, might not compare to larger corporations in total emissions, holistically have a significant impact. Therefore, understanding how the founder’s and the company’s values influence its ability to be sustainable is a theme not fully covered in the literature. This research focused on the influence of the founder’s values on social, environmental, and economic values on a company’s sustainability. The Agency Theory was used as a theoretical lens to analyze the values and sustainable-oriented behaviors of the founder and the company.

An exploratory case study was implemented through qualitative data collection and analysis. The main findings revealed that, by comparing the founder and company profiles, the inherent values of Veganism, Ethical Drive, and Ecological Consciousness influenced mainly the environmental and economic dimensions of the company’s sustainability to be more sustainable. Moreover, comparing their values according to Schwartz (1994) and Axsen and Kurani (2013), the founder and the company matched six over nine values. The inherent values influenced the growth in environmental, social, and economic dimensions of sustainability. This research contributes by highlighting the need to translate the inherent values to practice fostering sustainability in the private sector.

In a global context of change and uncertainty, the innovation capacity of organizations is key to their sustained development. The objective of this study is to empirically analyze the relationship between innovation and firm performance of micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) in emerging countries and to study the moderating role of investment and collaboration in these relationships. The least squares structural equation model (PLS-SEM) analyzed a sample of 104 SMEs in the wearing apparel sector in Peru and Colombia. Product Innovation together with Business Process Innovation, explained 47.1 % of organizational performance, 41.0 % of economic performance, 39.5 % of commercial performance and 36.9 % of productive performance. However, Product Innovation was not a significant predictor of productive or organizational performance.

The moderating effect of Investment on the relationship between Product Innovation and Business Process Innovation and Firm performance was only significant for organizational and productive performance and with respect to the moderating effect of Collaboration on the relationship between Product innovation and Business Process Innovation and Firm performance, in the quantitative analysis no significant prediction was obtained, supported by the results of the surveys where 62.8 % of the MSMEs never received supported from others actors for the development of innovation activities. The application of the findings of this study can contribute to the validation, updating or implementation of public policies that promote collaboration between actors of the innovation ecosystem, as well as in proposal of investment strategies for the development of innovation in emerging countries.

Our research explores how Stakeholder Capitalism can contribute to global governance to achieve all the 17 SDGs. We performed a mixed study through research synthesis, categorization, and network analysis. The main findings revealed that Stakeholder Capitalism and its principles are favorable to foster a friendly environment for achieving most of the SDGs and can contribute to global governance in achieving mainly the SDGs 8, 9, and 17. However, Stakeholder Capitalism literature is incipient for the SDGs 6, 14, and 15, needing further research development by considering non-human stakeholders and the environment. Findings also revealed that Stakeholder Capitalism could promote partnerships and consensus worldwide and be an optimal source for promoting decent work, economic growth, innovation, infrastructure development, and industrial dynamism in a sustainable manner.

We also discussed how the primary constructs of Stakeholder Theory related to Stakeholder Capitalism could contribute to achieving the SDGs: stakeholder construct, stakeholder salience (power, urgency, legitimacy, and proximity), corporate social responsibility, and value creation. Furthermore, we proposed a novel comprehensive methodology helpful in analyzing literature and categorical variables by enhancing the explanatory power of results through research synthesis, categorization, exploratory data analysis, degree centrality, and cross-network visualization. Finally, we suggested an agenda for future studies.