Abstract
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The environmental 'sustainability transition' presents challenges and opportunities for radical innovation in firms and production systems. Arguing that current measures are too incremental for the 'paradigm shift' required, the paper attempts to define a set of six ambitious 'stretch goals' for innovation in contributing to the solutions of complex problems in business sustainability. Using these stretch goals, we assess reflective comments from final year undergraduate business students for their awareness of the role of 'eco-innovation' in achieving sustainability. We find that, while students show a good understanding of business sustainability, corporate responsibility and innovation aimed at 'ecoefficiency', they undervalue the opportunities for long term, radical and collaborative eco-innovation at the industry sector and system levels. With further development the stretch goals may be useful in other contexts such as surveys of firms.