Identifying Corporate Innovative Sustainability Strategies in Consultancy Reports: A Systematic (Grey) Literature Review

Decarbonisation requires firms to rethink and redefine growth, informed by strong sustainability principles. Management consultants are important enablers for clients to strategically manage resource constraints, given their limited capabilities in this transition. Consultancy institutional logics play an important role in inducing new knowledge cooperative processes in consultant and client cognitive structures. This paper systematically reviews client‐facing reports generated during this process to identify emerging sustainability strategy issues and future theoretical applications. This is a novel way to apply a systematic literature review (SLR) to identify tacit knowledge outcomes in meta‐consulting knowledge creation pathways. The findings indicate that accessing consultancy institutional logic provides firms with intellectual resources to organise sustainability into manageable challenges to address legislative and competitive demands. A knowledge exchange gap between academia and the consulting industry is identified, and a framework is developed for practice‐oriented sustainability research by expanding the existing research on knowledge exchange loops between management and external knowledge providers.