Develop a blueprint for an innovative digital tool to drive forward sustainable business practices

Li, Weijia and Garraghan, Peter and Stowell, Alison and O'Reilly, Dermot (2023) Develop a blueprint for an innovative digital tool to drive forward sustainable business practices. Masters thesis, Lancaster University.

Text (2023weijialimsc)
2023weijialimsc.pdf - Published Version
Restricted to Repository staff only until 17 November 2028.
Download (8MB)

Abstract

Food and drink Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) have an important role to play achieving the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) agenda. However, due to the complexity of the SDGs, food and drink SMEs face barriers to implement sustainable practices and to comprehensively adopt the SDG framework. Sustainability/SDG management tools and frameworks have been previously developed with features to enhance business’ understanding of SDGs, to assist them in prioritising SDGs, to act as a monitoring tool, thereby supporting companies to engage and align with the SDGs. However, SMEs still face difficulties in employing these tools due to issues such as business awareness, tool’s suitability, ill-translated SDGs, limited resources, as well as a lack of external motivators. The purpose of this study is to identify the barriers faced by food and drink SMEs to engage with the SDG framework, as well as producing recommendations on the indicators and features for the development of an SDG management tool (INTOTO by SDG Changemakers). This is done through combining secondary and primary data collection on the barriers and SDG management tools, as well as investigating the methods to develop an indicator framework supporting the design of an SDG management tool. For the field research, a single case study was adopted with 4 semi-structured interviews, non-participant observation, along with access to relevant information at the case study company. This research identified three levels of the barriers faced by food and drink SMEs to engage with the SDG framework, including barriers to sustainable practices, barriers to the SDG framework, as well as barriers to utilising SDG management tools. In addition, 56 indicators and 14 sustainability topics are proposed for the indicator framework, under the concept and structure of the triple bottom line. It is important to comprehensively understand the full range of barriers so that the developed SDG management tool can effectively assist food and drink SMEs to align with the SDGs.