Despite the plethora of studies reported during the last decade in relation to educational innovation in teaching and assessment of competencies, a consensus is seemingly lacking on a definition that establishes the scope and boundaries competency assessment. This research gap motivated a systematic review of the literature published on the topics of “educational innovation in teaching” and “assessment of competencies” in upper secondary and higher education during the period from January 2016 to March 2021. The main objective of the study was to define and evaluate educational innovation in teaching and assessment of competencies in upper secondary and higher education following PRISMA guidelines for a systematic literature review (SLR) on a curated corpus of 320 articles. We intended to answer the following questions: (1) What do “educational innovation in teaching” and “assessment of competencies” represent for upper secondary and higher education? (2) How are they evaluated? Lastly, (3) are efforts exerted toward the standardization of transversal competencies? The SLR seeks answers to these questions by examining nine research sub-queries. The result indicated that the greatest effort toward educational innovation in competencies was made at the higher education level and targeted students. Competencies were revised through associations with the Sustainable Development Goals of the 2030 Agenda. In addition, the methodologies used for teaching and evaluation of competencies were reviewed. Finally, the study discussed which technologies were used to develop the proficiencies of students.

Despite the growing interest in purpose-driven business models, there is currently no operational, practice-based instrument that can be used to empirically assess corporate consciousness at the firm level based on the firm’s own reported practices rather than a self-report perceptual scale. This study addresses this gap by inductively developing the Conscious Business Index (CBi), an exploratory instrument built bottom-up from organizations’ reported practices using a sequential mixed-methods design. Drawing on data from 316 firms that participated in Deloitte’s Best Managed Companies (BMC) programme in Mexico (2023–2024), we conducted inductive thematic analysis (n = 243 open-ended responses), expert-panel evaluation (n = 7), and quantitative analysis (t-tests and k-means clustering). This was done to test whether BMC-awarded firms exhibit higher corporate consciousness than finalists. The results confirmed that the awarded firms scored significantly higher on the CBi than the finalists in both years ($d=1.04$ in 2023; $d=1.14$ in 2024), and this remained robust after controlling for cohort year, sector, firm size, and family business status ($\beta =0.098$, $p<0.001$). Furthermore, significant asymmetry emerged across the four pillars (Friedman $p<0.001$), with Higher Purpose solidifying over time as the lowest-scoring dimension. These results suggest that operational excellence does not consistently translate evenly into purpose-driven commitment. Current business-excellence frameworks capture the operational and cultural dimensions of conscious capitalism far more effectively than its philosophical core. This calls into question whether standard reporting requirements truly reflect genuine corporate consciousness.