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All lectures of Social Sustainable Technological Innovation
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Lectures SSTILecture 1: Monday 25-01-2021
Robert Kok & Hans Lekkerkerk
This course is about understanding the innovation behavior of firms. We look at firms as focal
organizations.
Course set up
- Students in teams of three to write an academic essay.
o On one of the two subthemes or grant theme
o Using academic literature, preferably journal articles, some of which are obligatory.
o Supported by a number of assignment questions, lectures and feedback sessions
o Receive max. 3 times written feedback, so choose three out of four feedback
sessions.
- And present it with another team at the end of the block
- Seminars will be replaced by sessions of your team with the supervisor
- Enroll to one of the three subtheme groups by Friday 29th of January 17h
Subthemes are crowdsourcing and organizational redesign
You have a lot of freedom, feel free to develop your own topic. Some may have difficulty to do that,
therefore we have listed these subthemes.
Subthemes
• Crowdsourcing and innovation → the wisdom of the crowd may be more valuable than the
wisdom of an individual
Whether and how to use knowledge of a crowd of people active in an online community to
generate sustainable technological innovation. Is it beneficial? And is yes, how should firms
use it? How to motivate people to contribute, often for free, to for example generate new
ideas or to test or valuate new products. You can also look at organizational issues. How to
address the number of ideas that are generated? You need to do something with that. You
get far more ideas than internal experts could possibly generate.
• Organization structure redesign and innovation
Is social innovation such as the redesign of the organizational structure an enabler or
consequence of technological and sustainable innovation, or both? You need structure in
order to produce innovation or is innovation also producing structure?
It is more a ‘journey of discovery’, leading to interaction and debate.
Organization structure redesign and social innovation is social innovation, such as the
redesign of the organizational structure, an enabler for, or a consequence of technological
and sustainable innovation, or both?
Structure redesign = a social innovation
Volberda e.a.:
First certain social innovations (e.g., in structure, management)
To innovate at the level of the organization is basically doing several innovation projects at
the same time.
,All (most) innovation projects (Ips) have multiple results
Social entrepreneurship as innovation: implications for structure
Social entrepreneurial companies or ‘B-corps’
These companies deliver products + use profit for social goods
- Dopper: https://dopper.com/
o Support for tap water projects 3rd world countries
- WakaWaka: https://waka-waka.com/nl/
o Gives away a light for every light sold here to a ‘no-grid’ country (safer, cheaper,
healthier than oil + enabling kids to do homework for school)
Surveillance capitalism: technological innovation with (detrimental) societal effect
- How can structure improve sustainability, social responsibility, and ethical behavior of
companies.
- Can technological innovation play a positive role?
- See Zubow
Introduction to innovation
Is it a result or a process?
There are different forms of innovations like there are different forms of dogs
Labrador, greyhound, spaniel, these are all dogs.
Social innovation, sustainable innovation, are all innovation.
Why innovation?
‘Most’ innovations have collateral damage. They did not only bring good things. So innovation may
have a downside
Can you name some for;
- Cars & aircraft: → air pollution, waste of material, victims in traffic
- DDT (pesticides) → may disturb food chains; a bird eating plants, something eating a bird,
etc.
- Medicine → side effects worse than cure
- Alphabet → also to write ‘Mein Kampf’, fake news is also using the alphabet.
- Nuclear physics → atom bomb on Japan, Chernobyl
So, why would society want or need innovation?? If they also bring all these bad things?
Most innovations done by organizations,
Leading to ‘new’:
- Products
- Services
- Processes
- Organizational structures
- Administrative/managerial
- Business model
- Merger and acquisitions
Note: read and/or between all of the above
The danger of studying only one type of innovation is that you lose the links between other forms of
innovation.
, Would you know the average success rate? → what percentage of innovation is a success? Or what
percentage of innovations fail?
Most innovations done by organizations FAIL → the average success rate is less than 30%
Suppose you failed 7 out of 10 exams in a study, would you continue that study?
So why would organizations continue to innovate when 7 out of 10 projects fail?
Societies without innovation:
- …Western perspective: ‘poor & primitive’
- … Isolated
Technological innovation and advancement is going better when you have more linkages to other
areas or people. This spurs the speed of development.
- … how about comparing on wellbeing or % burn-out
Organization: no innovation and business as usual:
- …for how long will such an organization survive?
- Would you know a viable organization that never innovated?
To stay in business, it is mandatory to innovate. You react to changes, to developments in your wider
environment. You may even use innovation to change the environment, think of Dopper. Unilever is
also actively pursuing to be more environmentally and socially concerned. It tries to have an
influence not only through their products but also through the way they innovate.
Innovations are to be distinguished as risky experiments. Organizations innovate to stay viable.
Organizations innovate as reaction to changes in growing demands from (wider) environment
(Bolwijn and Kumpe)
1960s efficiency
1970s quality
1980s flexibility
1990s innovation
… 2020s started → what where the demands in the last 30 years
2000s sustainability energy/material
2010s socially responsible as an organization, circumstances of people in the supply chain (in
Bangladesh for example)
2020s ethical justifiable (banking crisis) Are we ethically justifiable for the things we do?
So, the challenges companies are facing are becoming higher and higher. The success of these
companies that implement the three demands are doing reasonably well. Also from a shareholder
perspective.
Now: what is innovation?
Example: when hiking and camping like
this:
You need a torch
- How to innovate (improve)
mine?
- Suggestions:
o Make it lightweight
o Using renewable energy
sources, solar powered
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