To achieve sustainable development worldwide, the United Nations set 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for humanity to reach by 2030.

Society is involved in the challenge, with firms playing a crucial role.

In a paper published by Scientific Reports, researchers Alessia Patuelli (Northumbria University, IMT Lucca, Università di Firenze) and Fabio Saracco (IAC, CREF , IMT) provide a comprehensive and nearly real-time picture of firms’ engagement with SDGs

They used a novel interdisciplinary approach that analyzes online societal debates on Twitter with complex network methods from statistical physics. Results show that:

• SDGs themes tie conversations among major UK firms together;
• the social dimension is predominant;
• the attention to different SDG themes varies depending on the community and sector firms belong to;
• stakeholder engagement is higher on posts related to global challenges compared to general ones;
• large UK companies and stakeholders generally behave differently from Italian ones.

This paper provides theoretical contributions and practical implications relevant to firms, policymakers, and management education. Most importantly, it provides a novel tool and a set of keywords to monitor the influence of the private sector on the implementation of the 2030 Agenda.

Read the full paper