Business strategy and SDGs: enacting utopian thinking

Moving toward understanding how the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) can shape organisations’ behaviours, this chapter examines how SDGs can influence firms’ business strategies and unfold their intended benefits into organisations. Through the lens of utopia and utopian thinking, it examines how SDGs can be acknowledged as utopian goals and how enabling utopian thinking in organisations can change firms’ strategic thinking and encourage them to pursue SDGs. Instead of conceiving SDGs as a dream book, organisations can fruitfully embrace them as never-achievable goals in the long term, so guiding their behaviour and strategies towards gaining competitive advantage. Therefore, this chapter contributes to providing a theoretical framework and practical meaning of SDGs-inducted potential change in shaping businesses’ behaviour and strategies. This theoretical and practical view of SDGs can prevent them from being dismissed as unrealistic and impractical goals, thereby reducing the risk of rejection by organisations and their management’s rational mind and practical needs.