Technological innovation toward sustainability in manufacturing organizations: A circular economy perspective

Technological innovation has been widely recognized both as a trigger and catalyzer towards sus-tainability. However, hardly ever manufacturing companies are ready and mature enough to em-ploy technological innovations in their processes and business. Given the relevance of technologi-cal innovation in pursuing sustainability, it is hard to comprehend what are the prominent factors affecting the role of technological innovation to address sustainability and prioritize them. There-fore, the prime purpose of this study, applied to an emerging economy, is to analyze the contribu-tions of technological innovation toward sustainability in manufacturing organizations with a circular economy (CE) perspective. To address this objective, a questionnaire has been developed and conducted, also using the Grey VIKOR method and a sensitivity analysis. The findings from the study illustrate that entrepreneurship direction towards innovation and market direction to-wards innovation are the two potential factors of technological innovation towards sustainabil-ity. The implications highlight that CE, sustainable education and stakeholder engagement solu-tions can be crucial to the competitiveness of a developing country's manufacturing businesses.