Innovative, Creative and Sustainable Decision-Making in Changing Contexts

This monograph presents a unique and powerful bottom-up methodology for promoting and securing Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through innovative and creative decision-making and enactment in a wide variety of entrepreneurial innovation contexts. The authors identify four sustainable development enabling factors – (1) the presence of a trustworthy trading system for private and public goods; (2) the need for communication facilities for provenance exploration, authentication and demonstration; (3) the ability to build and support entrepreneurial innovation clusters bottom-up; and (4) the ability to establish caravanserai – and argue that these four factors can enable a strong bottom-up contribution to sustainability in all its forms. The authors investigate the changing contexts for decision support now emerging from the responses to pandemic-driven lockdowns, explore how in ancient history a set of sustainable development enabling factors was responsible for the enduring success of safe local and trans-national trading relationships, and reveal the role of these factors in recent history. They also provide a case study example of a coffee grower in Peru that successfully promotes the full set of sustainability-enabling factors through their own bottom-up innovative and creative activities. They discuss the opportunities arising from building a Sustainability-Enabling Decision Support (SEDS) platform and conclude by examining how success stories, mediated by a SEDS at the micro level can promote into new territories at the meso sand macro level guided by these sustainable development enabling factors.