The role of a stewardship mind in addressing grand challenges

This PhD research project aims to explore how businesses can contribute effectively to tackling major global challenges by adopting a stewardship mind, with a focus on circular economies and the twin transition. Based on an extensive literature review of the concept of stewardship, investigations include a circular economy case-study and an analysis of the impact of a stewardship mind on the development of technological and sustainable innovations in services. The contribution of this study is manifold: First, it provides a novel concept of stewardship mind, offering an analytical definition and a taxonomy of stewardship minds, which addresses a significant theoretical gap in management and business studies. Second, the empirical analyses (both qualitative and quantitative) support the effectiveness of a stewardship mind in driving businesses towards sustainable transition, providing empirical and practical contributions. Third, the extensive literature review methodology, which applied a Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) based topic modeling analysis to almost 1,200 papers, enables the analysis of a massive set of scientific publications. The findings of this research may inspire managers to adopt a Genuine Stewardship mind into their daily actions and communications and scholars to further investigate the concepts, as an array of managerial implications and avenues for future research are discussed throughout the thesis. Green themes (Action IV.5) provide the overall framework of this project. Specifically, the thematic area of the project (SMSI 2014-2020) is “Smart and sustainable industry, energy and environment” in the research field “Digital, Industry, Aerospace” (PNR 2021-2027) (9).