The COVID-19 outbreak has affected societies and organisations in an unprecedented way. This has resulted in negative impacts to economic and social issues, but it is a “blessing in disguise” for environmental issues. This paper analyses how the outbreak has affected organisations’ sustainability priorities. Prior to the COVID-19 outbreak, such priorities were on the economic dimension followed by the environmental and social dimensions. A survey was sent to 11,657 organisations to analyse such changes, with a 5.60% response rate. The results show that for organisations, the main priority is now on the social dimension, followed by the economic one; however, the environmental dimension has suffered a negative impact in prioritisation, regardless of organisation type, country where they are based, organisation size, or the time they have been working on sustainability. We are currently facing an environmental conundrum, where air quality has improved and pollution has decreased in societies, but organisations are starting to neglect such environmental issues. The COVID-19 outbreak is an opportunity for organisations to better contribute to sustainability by ensuring that the efforts that have been undertaken in the last three decades are not forgotten, and that societies and organisations are better coupled to face such crises and avert rebound effects.

Collaboration plays a key role in the contribution of organizations (civil society, corporate, and public sector ones) to sustainability; nonetheless, there has been limited research on collaboration elements, benefits, and challenges. A survey was developed for investigating collaboration for organizational sustainability (through elements, benefits, and challenges), to which 253 full responses were obtained. The survey responses were analyzed using Friedman tests, correlations, and multivariate statistical analyses. The results provide insights into the rankings of the elements, benefits, and challenges. The multivariate statistical analyses show that when organizations increase their collaboration on two element factors (business‐oriented and society‐oriented), there will be both benefits and challenges. The optimal solution to collaboration for organizational sustainability is where the factors are balanced in such a way that there are sufficient benefits but fewer challenges. If collaboration is unbridled, then the challenges will outweigh the benefits, thus there are limits to the implementation and growth of collaboration. From the analyses, the research proposes the “Organizational sustainability collaboration” framework dependent on the factors, the benefits, and the challenges obtained from collaborating, which can help organizations understand and better collaborate, so that benefits are maximized, and the challenges curtailed.

Innovative products have become crucial as firms vie for consumer attention in a saturated market. One important strategy is the use of external innovation providers. This study investigates reasons for outsourcing innovations (OI) and their relationship with firms’ performance. The results should assist firms in ascertaining how the reasons for OI affect firm performance. First, the conceptual framework of reasons for OI and related firm performance was synthesized from the open innovation literature. Then, highly innovative firms from twenty countries were surveyed and analysed using statistical tools. The results provided support for a conceptual framework with a positive relationship between five reasons for OI and firms’ overall performance. An implication for managers is that, if Contract Research Organisation (CRO) country’s environment is the only reason for entering into an OI contract, it might not be a good decision in terms of the respective firms’ overall performance.