RESEARCH ARTICLE Integrative Sustainable Intelligence: A holistic model to integrate corporate sustainability strategies Winston Jerónimo Silvestre 1 | Ana Fonseca 2 1 Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL), DINÂMIA'CET-IUL, Lisbon, Portugal 2 UFP Energy, Environment and Health Research Unit (FP-ENAS), Fernando Pessoa University, Porto, Portugal Correspondence Winston Jerónimo Silvestre, Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL), DINÂMIA'CET-IUL, Avenida das Forças Armadas Edifício ISCTE, Lisbon 1649-026 Portugal. Email: winstonjeronimo@gmail.com Abstract Organizations have been showing a growing awareness regarding the importance of corporate sustainability. However, the integration of sustainability concerns in com- panies' long-term planning, strategic management, processes, and activities is still challenging, disconnected, and often conducted in isolation. Based on a qualitative exploratory research combining different perspectives found in the literature, the present research presents a theoretical framework that is expected to enhance the adequate development and management of organizational sustainability-oriented practices — the Integrative Sustainable Intelligence model. This model provides orga- nizational managers with a structured framework to adequately understand, select, implement and assess sustainability promoting actions, based on the development of structural and systematic disruptive tools and involving the exchange of collaborative ideas between organizational stakeholders. The adoption of the Integrative Sustain- able Intelligence model is expected to foster change processes and innovations in the search for solutions for sustainability-oriented business models. KEYWORDS corporate sustainability, integrative sustainability, stakeholders, sustainable development, sustainable strategy 1 | INTRODUCTION The last five decades have witnessed a growing concern and a broad and important discussion regarding the impact of unsustainable prac- tices. Scholars, professionals, and even common citizens are highly aware of the need to study and change behaviours (Rockstrom et al., 2009). Figure 1 shows main approaches and contributions regarding the implementation of the necessary changes towards sustainability and well-being. Concerned about the importance of adequately understanding the consequences of human development, the implications of its impacts and the problems caused by a changing lifestyle, the United Nations (UN), during its Conference on the Human Environment in 1972 (UN, 1972), introduced the principles that would later support the concept of sustainable development 1 (SD). This concept would become a sociopolitical, economic, and environmental objective, ratified by the Brundtland Commission in the document entitled “Our Common Future” (World Commission on Environment and Develop- ment, 1987). Based on this work, Elkington suggests the understand- ing of sustainability through a three-dimensional vision, known as “triple bottom line” (TBL) (Elkington, 1999). Sustainability will be achieved through the adequate balance, in each moment, of the eco- nomic capital and its profitability, the environmental capital and its preservation, and the social capital and its equity (Jerónimo Silvestre, Antunes, & Filho, 2014). The definition of SD proposed in the Brundtland report is simple and attractive and has inspired different definitions for corporate sustainabil- ity (CS) — namely, the one developed by Dyllick and Hockerts (Dyllick & Hockerts, 2002) and the one developed by Bansal (Bansal, 2005). How- ever, all these definitions have the disadvantage of being vague, which hinders their adequate understanding and operationalization (Lankoski, 2016; Poddar, Narula, & Zutshi, 2019). Therefore, organizations face Received: 3 October 2019 Revised: 13 December 2019 Accepted: 8 January 2020 DOI: 10.1002/csr.1906 Corp Soc Responsib Environ Manag. 2020;1–13. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/csr © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment 1