Excavating the concepts of sustainability and innovation within the supply chains; past trend, future vision

Alongside with industrialization of societies, supply chains increasingly and negatively affect the environment and social issues through wasteful consumption of natural resources and creating ecological pollution. This paper aimed at examining how sustainability and innovation can be discussed at the level of the supply chain. In doing so, a systematic literature review was carried out with a special focus on papers published by Scopus from 2015 up to 2018. This period of time was selected due to the prior research covering the time span of 1996 to 2014. The descriptive aspects of the published papers were first examined. Then, the contextual analysis was accomplished. The analysis showed an upward trend of literature in numerical terms and a wider spread of sustainability and innovations. Additionally, the study highlighted further areas of research that are deserving of attention. These areas include analysis of specific research activities in the less developed countries and more attention on the social and environmental dimension of sustainability. Finally, a framework is developed which could constitute the basis for further developments and research on this issue.