Research and innovation for sustainability transformation – modern outlooks and actual challenges

Technology innovations, the expanding digitisation of all sectors and global megatrends are changing how European citizens live, offering huge potential and unique challenges. The concept of innovation has become more general, exceeding the boundaries of research and development, patents, scientific articles and publications. It increasingly includes new business models, social aspects and technical matters for environmental protection. The paper investigates the modern outlooks of research and innovation that represent the ubiquity concerns of Europe facing global competition and striving to maintain its distinctive social model in line with sustainable development. The authors focused on an updated literature review on research and innovation for a sustainability transition. They analysed the political frameworks and strategic initiatives to support certain interventions for promoting the overarching role of innovation toward sustainable development. Through analysing secondary data provided by well-known innovation performance indicators (i.e. Global Innovation Index and European Innovation Scoreboard), different vulnerabilities of the local context (i.e. Romania country) were identified, and relevant improvement measures were emphasised to meet the agenda focused on a transition to sustainability. The findings made a structured contribution to the emerging field of research and innovation for sustainability transformation. They can be valuable for academics, researchers and decisional factors interested in increasing awareness about the EU strategic initiatives in research and innovation as well as some of the challenges of the country's innovation performance.