Building capacity for sustainability transformations through transdisciplinary experimentation: Empirical evidence from a novel methodology deployed in 7 countries

In 2022, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) established that global greenhouse gas emissions trajectories are not on track to limiting warming to less than 2 ° C above pre-industrial averages (IPCC 2022a). Given that broader progress towards ambitious climate change and sustainability goals remains incremental, a whole-of-society approach, including transformative innovation in the private sector, is required to trigger the necessary changes within deeply unsustainable social and technical systems. This paper develops and illustrates an evidence-based process to enable organizations to foster sustainability transformations beyond a firm’s traditional boundaries. Based on 42 rich qualitative cases studies, a range of transdisciplinary capacity-building events in 7 countries, and 13 co-produced experiments, we develop the logic behind, and empirically test, an iterative process that maps the sustainability pathways of small firms, builds capacity for transformations among them, triggers new experiments, and reflects upon how these actions can and are influencing broader transformations towards sustainability. We find that small businesses have the potential to facilitate sustainability transformations, both within their organizational boundaries, and within the broader ecosystem of which they are a part. We find that transformative sustainability practices are relational (in that they rely on a web of relationships among many ‘ecosystem’ actors rather than a single organization) and may be fundamentally altered by transdisciplinary co-production methodologies. Ultimately, we found an iterative relationship between capacity and experimentation: capacity was built through experimentation, which then revealed potential capacity gaps or needs that could be remedied through iteration. • A transdisciplinary methodology was developed to map the evolution of sustainable business practices and models, build absorptive capacity, and co-create experiments. • Sustainable business practices and models unfold in a complex, non-linear process that is deeply connected to a broader ecosystem of actors. • Many factors than enable sustainability entrepreneurship are social/human rather than technical. This includes organizational culture, leadership, values,and community embeddedness. • Capacity can be built prior to, and also throughout, the process of experimentation in an iterative process. • Capacity built in the ecosystem may target deeper leverage points that support the amplification of sustainability entrepreneurship.