Scope
The overall objectives of the conference are to advance the theory and practice of Business Sustainability, implementation and promotion of practices in companies towards sustainability across multiple dimensions on all organisational levels, from strategic management to operational levels, in every type of business and for every company’s function.
To bridge the gaps between theory and practice, between academia and companies, between abstract and real worlds, and to bring people in the centre, as a critical success factor towards business sustainability.
Topics
10th International Conference on
BUSINESS SUSTAINABILITY 2026
Management, Technology and Learning for Individuals, Organisations and Society in Turbulent Environments
25 - 27 November 2026
Portugal
Keynotes
Keynote Lecture 2:
Available soon
Keynote Lecture 1:
Bridging the gap: reframing digital sustainability in the era of industry 5.0
Prof. Olga Battaïa
KEDGE Business School (France)
Abstract
Industry 5.0 is widely recognized for its emphasis on human-centricity, resilience, and alignment with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. However, the sustainability of digital technologies themselves remains insufficiently addressed within current Industry 5.0 frameworks. This keynote examines how digital sustainability, defined as the environmentally responsible, socially inclusive, and economically viable design, deployment, and management of digital systems, is reflected in existing roadmaps and conceptual models. The analysis indicates that digital transformation is frequently promoted as a catalyst for sustainable growth, while critical concerns such as energy efficiency, data governance, digital infrastructure lifecycles, and the ethical use of artificial intelligence receive comparatively limited attention. This creates a potential gap between the aspirations of Industry 5.0 and the sustainability of its underlying digital foundation. The keynote addresses this challenge by discussing the implications of this gap and outlining an integrated agenda for future development.
Prof. Olga Battaïa is a Full Professor at the Department of Operations Management and Information Systems at KEDGE Business School. She previously served as Associate Dean for Research (2020–2025), where she provided strategic oversight to nine research centers and more than 200 faculty members. She currently serves as Associate Editor for leading journals including IISE Transactions, Omega – The International Journal of Management Science, and Journal of Manufacturing Systems. She is also a member of the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Production Economics and a member of the International Advisory Board for Nexus 2050 (The International Center for a Green and Low-Carbon Hydrogen Economy) and acts as DEI Chair of the IFAC Technical Committee on Management and Control in Manufacturing and Logistics.
Prof. Battaïa’s research lies at the intersection of supply chain management, sustainable manufacturing, business analytics, and equity-aware decision support. She co-authored more than 270 scientific publications and supervised18 PhD and DBA students and over 120 Master’s students. She has coordinated and contributed to numerous competitive research projects funded by the French National Research Agency, the German Research Foundation (DFG), and the European Union, addressing complex challenges such as decision-making under uncertainty, sustainable and reconfigurable production systems, and human-centric operations management.
Keynote Lecture 2:
Available soon
Keynote Lecture 3:
From Artisanal Practice to Systematic Methodology: Sustaining Innovation Capability in Biohybrid Deep-Tech Ventures
Prof. Igor Balaz
University of Novi Sad (Serbia)
Abstract
Deep-tech ventures built on emerging science face a distinctive sustainability problem. Their capability often lives as tacit expertise in a few irreplaceable people, developed through artisanal trial and error, and difficult to transfer, scale, or defend against the loss of key staff. Biohybrid engineering, which combines living cells with engineered structures, makes this challenge acute: biological variability, distributed fabrication, and long development cycles keep the craft dependent on individual judgment. This keynote argues that innovation capability becomes sustainable only when tacit expertise is deliberately converted into systematic, reusable methodology.The talk shows how a design process that began as informal expert practice can be formalised into a documented, computational framework, where artificial intelligence, simulation, and machine learning capture and encode the design knowledge that once lived only in expert judgment. The result is organisational knowledge that outlives any single project or person, a human-in-the-loop system that keeps people at the centre, and a defensible asset that strengthens the venture economically. The lessons generalise well beyond biohybrid systems. For any deep-tech venture operating in turbulent environments, sustaining innovation depends less on individual brilliance and more on building the infrastructure that turns brilliance into a transferable, durable capability.
Prof. Igor Balaz is founder and CEO of Neovivum Technologies and Professor of Biophysics at the University of Novi Sad, Serbia. Trained first in biology and then in the physics of complex systems, he has spent his career bridging disciplines to understand how living systems adapt and to design computational systems that evolve. He has coordinated several major EU research projects, including EVO-NANO and BioMeld, and secured a US Office of Naval Research grant to develop frameworks for evolvable, metacognitive artificial agents. In 2024 he founded Neovivum to translate this vision into clinical impact and ideated and won the EU EIC Pathfinder project CancerScan, which develops digital twins to predict therapy resistance in cancer. His work is driven by a single conviction: that understanding biological adaptability and designing self-improving computational systems are two expressions of one challenge. He pursues both in parallel, from precision oncology to evolvable metacognitive systems.