Fake news and sustainability-focused innovations: A review of the literature and an agenda for future research

Sustainability research has witnessed significant growth over the past three decades, owing to the multiplicity of concerns and innovations to address them. Fake news, on the other hand, is a growing challenge to this dynamic narrative about sustainability and associated innovations. Notwithstanding few attempts to glean insights from literature at the nexus of sustainability, concomitant innovations, and fake news, the current study undertakes an integrative literature review with the objective of comprehending the repertoire of interactions between fake news, concomitant acts of deception, and sustainability-focused innovations. The review yielded 81 research articles published between 1992 and 2022. This collection represents a highly heterogeneous body of work encompassing these dimensions wherein comprehensive frameworks are rare and empirical works have focused on a limited range of innovations and fake news. The paper organizes the extant literature across four key themes and identifies five crucial gaps that have remained underexplored to date. Based on gaps in the literature, a research agenda with a set of thematic pathways and a holistic conceptual framework is presented to serve as a foundation for advancing research in the domain. This study is one of the first attempts to shed light on the menace of fake news in the context of sustainability-focused innovations and provides the necessary impetus for researchers to investigate empirical relationships and causal mechanisms surrounding the triadic nature of interlinkages between sustainability concerns, associated innovations, and fake news. The insights from this study aid practitioners in evaluating innovations from a novel vantage point and devising strategies to navigate potential pitfalls, while also serving as crucial evidence for policymakers to leverage an optimal mix of policy levers to circumvent sustainability concerns and foster innovations amidst the looming crisis of fake news.