In this work, we integrate the concepts of Industry 4.0, smart manufacturing, and sustainable manufacturing in a model that provides a conceptual framework for the study of long-term solutions with a high degree of specialization, according to the specific context of each investigation. This study offers a holistic analysis and evaluation of the main challenges facing the Industry 4.0 concept. We also diagnose the current methodological proposals aimed at solving the challenges of Industry 4.0 and sustainability using a systemic review of the literature from the past 5 years. Firstly, we identify 14 technological trends linked to Industry 4.0. Subsequently, the trends are integrated into the proposed model to identify opportunities, evaluating their relationship with three performance areas. This allows the identification of trends that present the greatest number of opportunities in the context of sustainability. The second stage complements the literature review with a descriptive analysis of the studies and discusses the findings. The study concludes that the identified technological trends positively impact Industry 4.0 challenges, helping to achieve sustainable manufacturing objectives.

This study examines how firms’ environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance aligns with their financial condition in an emerging-market setting. Focusing on companies operating in Chile, we implement a hybrid descriptive–prescriptive framework. The descriptive stage identifies groups of firms with similar financial characteristics. The prescriptive stage isolates the financial ratios that contribute the most to group separation. This data-driven approach captures non-linear relationships and firm-level heterogeneity without imposing restrictive functional assumptions. The analysis uncovers two dominant financial profiles. Firms with stronger ESG performance tend to exhibit higher activity ratios and lower leverage, consistent with tighter working-capital discipline and more conservative financing. Conversely, firms with weaker ESG performance display a more profit-, capital-intensive profile. These patterns suggest that ESG orientation corresponds to distinct strategic and financial configurations rather than a uniform pathway to performance. Empirically, this work provides context-specific evidence from Latin America, where ESG-finance analyses remain limited. The findings of this study offer practical insights for investors, analysts and corporate decision-makers assessing how sustainability commitment relates to financial condition and potential long-term value creation of firms in emerging markets.

Allocating scarce budgetary resources across the strategic objectives of the balanced scorecard (BSC) and the sustainability balanced scorecard (SBSC) is a central problem in sustainability-oriented strategic management. Existing approaches typically operate at the level of aggregated perspectives, rely on subjective weighting schemes, or ignore the causal structure of the strategy map. This article formalizes the problem as a cooperative game in which each strategic objective is a player and the value of every coalition combines the individual performance of its members with the synergies arising from the causal relationships of the strategy map, estimated through the decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL). The Shapley value is adopted as the allocation rule. The resulting game is shown to be superadditive and convex, the Shapley value belongs to the Core, and the rule satisfies exhaustiveness, fairness, sensitivity to the strategy map, monotonicity, and convergence to the proportional rule. Computational experiments and sensitivity analyses support the robustness of the model. In an illustrative case—a sustainability balanced scorecard with ten objectives organized in five perspectives, whose dedicated sustainability perspective hosts a carbon-emission and an employee-safety objective, and a budget of USD 1M—the framework shifts $2.7\%$ of the total budget relative to a proportional allocation (individual objectives change by up to $12.3\%$), funds employee safety above financial cost reduction for any synergy weight $\gamma \ge 0.15$, keeps the combined share of the sustainability objectives stable within $0.6$ percentage points across the entire synergy range, and grants seed funding to sustainability objectives that enter the map without a measured baseline, providing a transparent and auditable basis for sustainable budget allocation.