Assessing suppliers considering social sustainability innovation factors during COVID-19 disaster

Innovation can be considered one of the fundamental elements for ensuring sustainability. Companies have started to enhance their sustainability level through the application of innovative practices. The importance of employing innovative social sustainability practices within the supply chain seems to have escalated with the advent of COVID-19. However, studies focusing on the social aspect of sustainability innovation when selecting suppliers during the COVID-19 disaster are non-existent. Selecting these types of suppliers can significantly help companies to be more socially innovative and obtain sustainable development targets. This work introduces a social sustainability innovation framework for assessing suppliers during the COVID-19 pandemic. A group grey-best worst method (Group GBWM) is utilized to identify the criteria weights and improved grey relational analysis (IGRA) is utilized for ranking the suppliers. Findings show that “safety and health practices”, “remote working conditions”, and “localization” are the most important social sustainability innovation criteria, respectively, in choosing suppliers during COVID-19. A manufacturing firm is utilized as an example for verifying the efficiency of the proposed model and framework. This work helps industrial experts and researchers to better understand and focus on the social aspect of sustainable innovation, particularly when selecting suppliers during the critical COVID-19 pandemic situation.