Sustainability by Design in Decentralized Autonomous Organizations: An Empirical Review of Governance, Innovation, and Institutional Design

Abstract: Recent innovation theories on economics remain largely grounded in assumptions of hierarchical firms and closed organizational boundaries, offering limited insight into how innovation unfolds within decentralized, digitally native organizations. Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) represent an emerging form of innovation ecosystem characterized by blockchain-based transparency, open participation, and token-driven governance, in which sustainability can be embedded directly into organizational design. This study compares two standards, ERC-8004 and Google A2A, who address the same agent interoperability question, while the former is governed by DAO and the latter by corporation consortium. They are examined through an LLM-powered comparative pipeline for large-scale governance discourse analysis, integrating automated annotation, neural topic modeling, and multi-layer network analysis to study socio-technical power structures. The study provides evidence-based insights for scholars, policymakers, and designers seeking to align innovation, technological governance, and sustainability in future organizational forms.