*5.2.5 Complexity of driving sustainability innovation*

The insight is that sustainable leadership pursue sustainability innovation. For example, Avery and Bergsteiner [17] are explicit that innovation is one of the key performance drivers of sustainability. However, clarity on what constitutes sustainability innovation and how leaders advance this type of innovation in an organisation or society is missing. Sustainable leadership drives three sustainability innovation types: Operational, organisational transformation and systems building. Operational innovation is about the change of processes (doing the same thing better), which occurs in many areas, e.g. design, production, marketing and even HR. Organisational transformation creates disruptive new products and services that serve societal needs and benefit the environment. Lastly, systems building depicts the most advanced form of sustainable innovation. It involves **collaborating with others** to create positive impacts on people and the planet. Sustainable leaders see themselves as part of an ecosystem and recognise that any single organisation cannot achieve sustainability [40].

However, the challenge for sustainable leadership is to embed innovative capacity that focuses on the long-term survival of a sustainable organisation. Pursuing disruptive and sustaining innovation as part of sustainable transformation may be easy. However, it is tough to deliver without appropriate top management support and a network of leaders with sustainability literacy as a foundation to challenge traditional approaches and disrupt their organisations, business and industry to operate differently.

When sustainable leaders engage in sustainable innovation, they do not merely focus on their organisation. More importantly, they look more broadly at the whole system they are part of—including other organisations, the natural environment, stakeholders and communities as exemplified in the framework by Šimanskienė and Župerkienė [40]. Sustainable leadership adopts systems thinking and understands how their actions affect other organisations and vice versa.
