Literature Management of Sustainable Innovation
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Session 1
Bohnsack, R., Bidmon, C. M., & Pinkse, J. (2022). Sustainability in the digital age: Intended
and unintended consequences of digital technologies for sustainable development. Business
Strategy and the Environment, 31(2), 599-602.
Traditionally, sustainability has been viewed from a triple bottom line perspective (i.e.,
environmental, social, and economic sustainability). Sustainability in the digital age blurs the
boundaries of the triple bottom line and transcends the dimensions of sustainable value.
Digital technologies support the reorganization of supply chains, enable resource- and
energy-efficient consumption, and accelerate the diffusion of sustainable innovation.
However, it also raises new issues that cast doubt on the digital economy’s net effect on
sustainability, such as an increase in energy use and resource usage to produce hardware.
New sustainable technologies afford advantages as they bring more comfort or enable more
efficient production processes. Yet they also have drawbacks. For example, electric vehicles
reduce emissions, but on the other hand its manufacturing creates higher strains on natural
resources, primarily due to the greater use of (rare) metals and energy needed for battery
production. Trade-offs in sustainability are common because it encompasses many different
(rival) objectives.
Affordances:
- More efficient process
- More social inclusivity by being borderless
- Create transparency and accountability
- Longer use because of software updates
- Low cost
- Large scale
- Spark creativity
- Form basis of novel sustainable solutions as platforms against food waste, digital
payment systems, or shared mobility platforms
Negative effects:
- Social and ethical concerns, such as data privacy and consumer lock-in
- Algorithms create bias for gender and skin type
- Social media platforms allow spreading of fake news
- Material footprint has quadrupled
- Climate change impacts of ICT manufacturing have doubled
Digital technologies are reprogrammable and homogenize data. This combination leads to
convergence and generativity. Convergence means that previously separated user or
,product experiences are combined, and thus digital ecosystems emerge, while generativity
refers to unprompted change driven by large, varied, and uncoordinated audiences.
The introduction of digital technologies can have unpredictable effects on individuals,
industry, and society. These new paths compromise or marginalize the net effect of the
intended sustainable outcome. As a consequence, digital technologies can unintendedly
lead to the disruption of social, economic, or political arrangements, and trigger ethical
dilemmas.
First, a digital technology’s introduction has first-order consequences for sustainable value
creation as intended positive impacts are realized or not. While a technology has deliberate
sustainable benefits on introduction, it only becomes clear when in use whether these
benefits are realized. A technology’s sustainable benefits are often amplified when the
technology enters the market but might get marginalized when it is not used appropriately.
The technology can also prove unsuccessful and be abandoned, leading to neither positive
nor negative outcome. Second, due to generativity, a digital technology’s introduction also
has unintended consequences for sustainability: it creates positive or negative side-effects
that either create additional sustainable value or destroy existing sustainable value instead.
These unintended consequences can add to the realized outcome or create entirely new
paths.
Digital technologies’ intended and unintended consequences for sustainability
,Adams, R., Jeanrenaud, S., Bessant, J., Denyer, D., & Overy, P. (2016). Sustainability-
oriented innovation: A systematic review. International Journal of Management Reviews,
18(2), 180-205
Introduction
Sustainable development: development that meets the needs of the present without
compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.
Sustainability-oriented innovation (SOI): making intentional changes to an organization’s
philosophy and values, as well as to its products, processes, or practices, to serve the
specific purpose of creating and realizing social and environmental value in addition to
economic returns.
Developing an initial ‘architecture’ for reviewing SOI
Three dimensions of SOIs emerge in the conceptual framework:
- Technical/people
- Stand-alone/integrated
- Insular/systemic
Technical/people
The literature to date has been dominated by a technically focused, product-oriented view
of innovation, promoting incremental adjustments in practice to attend to environmental
challenges. Contrasting with this is a more recent focus on people-centred innovation, in
which sustainability is treated as a socio-technical challenge affecting a cluster of elements
including, for example, technology, regulation, user practices and markets, cultural
meaning, infrastructure and supply networks. The technical responses that characterize
early SOI literature have become supplemented or supplanted by fundamental
transformations at different levels of socio-technical systems. Advanced players innovate in
domains beyond the technical, such as adopting new business models or replacing products
with services that represent alternatives, or additions, to primarily technological solutions,
suggesting that the focus is not just technological, but also on how innovations are used,
who they involve, and how they impact behavior change.
Stand-alone/integrated
This dimension is internal to the firm and describes the extent to which SOI thinking extends
across the firm: whether or not SOIs ‘stand-alone’ as increments to the dominant design
associated, typically, with individual departments, functions or products, or are integrated
widely through the firm. Innovation for sustainable manufacturing has moved on from end-
of-pipe, ‘stand-alone’ solutions to modes of practice that require sustainability to be more
deeply embedded in the culture of the firm: for example, through the effective adoption of
product lifecycle thinking, integrated environmental strategies and environmental
management systems. That is, SOI moves from being an ‘add-on’ activity to diffusing and
suffusing throughout the organization as strategic sustainability behavior.
, Insular/systemic
This dimension is about whether or not innovations are internally oriented, addressing
internal issues, or are designed and targeted to impact a wider socio-economic system
beyond the firm’s immediate boundaries and stakeholders. More progressive SOI firms are
described as looking beyond their boundaries, engaging with and facilitating change in wider
systems and engaging with diverse actors, possibly including forming coalitions with
stakeholders such as NGOs, lobby groups and governments.
Based on an analysis of stage/phase models and typologies of environmental management,
the authors propose three initial contexts of SOI activity, initially labelled, ‘Reactive’,
‘Embedding’, and ‘Systems Change’. Eventually the framework was iterated as follows:
Framework synthesis – final models of SOI
- Strategy: organizational and management pro- r cesses aligned to deliver
sustainability
- Innovation process: the organization of the innovation process to deliver
sustainability, from searching for new ideas to converting them into products
and services and capturing value from them
- Learning: recognizing the value of new knowledge, assimilating, and applying it to
support sustainability
- Linkages: internal and external linkages crafted as opportunities for learning and
influencing around sustainability
- Innovative organization: work organization arrangements that create the conditions
within which SOI can take place (e.g., enabling structures, communications, training
and development, leadership and, reward and recognition).
