RESEARCH

Natural resource scarcity presents one of the most pressing grand challenges for management scholarship. This editorial outlines how the field has historically overlooked natural resources, focusing instead on human and organizational assets. The authors highlight the growing societal, economic, and geopolitical implications of resource scarcity and call for management researchers to engage with issues such as resource access, supply chain disruptions, regulatory responses, and business model innovation. Drawing on interdisciplinary insights and case examples, the editorial proposes a research agenda that integrates sustainability, institutional governance, and organizational strategy. By doing so, it urges scholars to contribute actionable knowledge to the debate on sustaining Earth’s natural systems and ensuring equitable, resilient access to critical resources.

We explore how digital technologies are helping address grand challenges to tackle climate change and promote sustainable development. With digital technologies, entrepreneurial organizations have adopted innovative approaches to tackle seemingly intractable societal challenges. We refer to these broadly as digital sustainability activities. By focusing on the digital toolbox employed by pioneering organizations, we propose a research agenda that generates novel questions for entrepreneurship, business models, and ecosystems as well as new ways of thinking about trust and institutional logics. We believe that digital sustainability can spur empirical advances in entrepreneurship, innovation, and strategy with potential for positive impact on society.

We discuss how environmental and pandemic crises in combination with digitization are presenting the multinational enterprise (MNE) with increasing geopolitical, organizational, and market tensions. Institutional pluralism is creating a more complex global environment. The organization of productive work is shifting, which challenges how MNEs structure and coordinate their activities. Changing consumer and investor expectations are broadening the understanding of value creation with implications for business models. We contend that the tensions invite MNEs to reconsider how they frame, formalize, and realize corporate purpose. We close with a research agenda that recognizes the need for MNEs to become purpose-driven actors.