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The recent economic slowdown and subsequent bounce back has translated into different learnings for different organizations (Nuchter et al., 2021). While some have been quick enough to grab the opportunity by acquiring new learnings and changing accordingly, others have not been able to adjust to the changing situation and stagnated out (Cantone et al., 2021). Whatever the organizational strategy and response, a common undercurrent may be identified that have helped micro small and medium level organizations to survive during these tough times when bigger organizations have incurred huge losses and even closed down. One such factor happens to be acquiring newer learnings over a time period (Dzhengiz & Hockerts, 2022).
Organizations try to learn new things amidst a fast, dynamic and changing world and develop their cognition processes accordingly (Dzhengiz & Hockerts, 2022). The process of organizational cognition has been studied in detail (Secchi & Adamnson, 2017; Secchi & Cowley, 2018) and has been found to be effective in solving organizational issues (Secchi & Cowley, 2018).
Sustainability had been the top priority of organizations including Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (Czainska et al., 2021; Syamsari et al., 2022) for which they have been designing strategies and making policies amidst a host of factors that include government interventions, internal weaknesses and rampant disruptions (Syamsari et al., 2022). This finds a place in core organizational activities and strategies as well (Dzhengiz, 2020; Watson et al., 2018). The implementation of sustainability related measures in Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) is a vital problem and has received attention in literature only recently (Andriyani et al., 2021; Endris & Kassegn, 2022; Prameka et al., 2021; Vasquez et al., 2021). One issue that arises here is whether sustainability is linked to the understanding of cognition process of MSMEs that may help them not only grow but also survive over a period of time.
The role of MSMEs is critical to the Indian economy and they affect the overall business situation in the country (Batra & Sharma, 2018; Kaur & Saini, 2021). Therefore, the sustainable efforts of MSMEs assume all the more significance (Jayanti & Raghunath, 2018) and the sustainability practices of Indian MSMEs have been studied for their effectiveness (Maheshwari et al., 2020), growth and opportunities (Zanjurne, 2018). Important policy changes have posed several challenges for Indian MSMES like global competition (Shetty, 2022) and this may mean greater focus on sustainability for Indian MSMEs. This paper addresses the sustainability of Indian MSMEs by understanding their cognition process.