In the era of rapid technological advancement, there is a pressing need for adopting responsible innovation (RI) practices due to technology’s adverse impact on society. RI, being a novel concept, provides innovative solutions for addressing ethical, social, and sustainable development (SD) issues. Organizations, due to intractable societal challenges, resort to RI for creating value for stakeholders and establishing governance mechanisms for achieving SD goals. To attain this, a systematic literature review is conducted with an analysis of 48 research articles obtained from the Scopus database between 2003 and 2024. The study uses the Theory–Characteristics–Context–Methodology review framework along with PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) guidelines. The study identifies key theories such as the extended resource-based view, stakeholder theory, and principal-agent theory. Moreover, the study discusses the antecedents’ mechanism and its potential outcomes, offering insights to direct enterprises achieve ethical and social integrity with improvement in sustainable performance. Our study contributes to the existing literature and also provides future research directions to expand the available knowledge.

Responsible innovation, sustainability, ethics, stakeholder engagement, organization

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