Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management Corp. Soc. Responsib. Environ. Mgmt. 25, 106–109 (2018) Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/csr.1487
Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management Invites Contributions for a Special Issue on ‘Sustainable Innovation: Processes, Strategies, and Outcomes’ Lorenzo Ardito,1* Javier Carrillo-Hermosilla,2 Pablo del Río3 and Pierpaolo Pontrandolfo1 1
Politecnico di Bari, Bari, Italy Universidad de Alcala, Madrid, Spain 3 Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Madrid, Spain 2
Background and Focus of the Special Issue
S
INCE THE 2005 WORLD SUMMIT ON SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT, SOCIETIES ARE EXPECTED TO DESIGN THEIR GROWTH STRATEGIES ACCORDING
to the three main sustainable development goals, i.e. economic development, social inclusion, and environmental protection, which reflect the three pillars of the triple bottom line approach characterizing a sustainable business development (Cohen et al., 2008; Glavas and Mish, 2015). In recent years, one of the key topics tackled by the sustainable development discourse concerns the interrelated relationship between firms’ innovation dynamics and sustainability. Indeed, the development and diffusion of sustainable innovations by companies have been deemed to be a necessary condition to follow the triple bottom line approach, thus favouring social and environmental responsiveness, while boosting economic growth (Dibrell et al., 2015). Accordingly, sustainable innovations represent a mean through which organizations can actually foster sustainable development (Kennedy and Marting, 2016). At the same time, current sustainability challenges can become a source of inspiration for novel innovative trajectories, which may enhance firms’ competitiveness and contribute to construct a better society (Wagner, 2009). However, academics have noticed that more than 20 years after sustainable development was first conceptualized, the triple bottom line approach is far from being the dominant business model for companies (Hall and Wagner, 2012; Schaltegger et al., 2016). Furthermore, most of the firms’ innovation efforts focus on only one development goal at a time, and research has yet to provide an in-depth discussion on how to reconcile the three sustainability pillars in innovation dynamics (Hart and Milstein, 2003; Longoni and Cagliano, 2016). For instance, only recently have scholars called for the development of innovations that concurrently meet economic and environmental concerns, as indicated by the concept of eco-innovation (Carrillo-Hermosilla et al., 2010; Kiefer et al., 2017). Moreover, the role of social issues in this discussion has been undervalued. Notably, social aspects in innovation have been usually treated as a standalone topic in the managerial literature, being mainly related to the emerging paradigm of social innovation (e.g. Ettorre et al., 2015) and to the corporate social responsibility literature (e.g. Voegtlin and Scherer, 2017). The previous arguments emphasize that more research is needed to fully comprehend the interrelated nature of firms’ innovation dynamics and sustainability. Specifically, the first topic for further research refers to the processes *Correspondence to: Lorenzo Ardito, Politecnico di Bari, Bari, Italy. E-mail:
[email protected] Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment
107 allowing companies to manage and integrate the three development goals with the most common innovation dynamics, e.g. supply chain and manufacturing strategies, knowledge search strategies, and human resource management. In fact, the need to mitigate possible trade-offs between the three development goals increases the complexity that managers face with respect to the operationalization of the triple bottom line approach since it requires a paradigm shift in the strategy of firms to promote sustainable innovations (Etzion, 2007; Pogutz and Winn, 2016). In turn, such a shift often calls for organizational restructuring, more various knowledge components, new routines in partner selection, and the redefinition of the innovation value chain (Johnson, 2015; Rego et al., 2017), thus leading to novel approaches towards innovation processes, which however have yet to be fully explored. Furthermore, sustainable development requires a ‘society pool’ approach to innovation in that different stakeholders (e.g. employees, customers, suppliers, and governments) are involved (Gasbarro et al., 2017; Vollenbroek, 2002; Wu, 2017). On the one hand, stakeholders’ involvement helps to clarify the criteria for sustainable outcomes and operationalize new strategic practices for innovation according to these criteria. On the other hand, the ultimate sustainability goals of each stakeholder are not usually aligned. Thereby, considering many stakeholders in sustainable innovation activities exacerbates bounded rationality challenges, increases coordination and collaboration problems along the supply chain, enhances transaction costs and missing communication, amplifies ambiguity, and creates legitimacy problems (Hall and Wagner, 2012). This opens the doors to a second, despite understudied, line of inquiry, which attempts to elucidate how companies developing sustainable innovations deal with issues such as differences in stakeholder interests, which stakeholders should be involved and in which phase of the innovation value chain, who within the organization should participate in the stakeholder selection, and the identification of primary and secondary stakeholders. Finally, a third theme may relate to the implementation of a triple bottom line approach to measuring the performance outcomes of sustainable innovations. In fact, an analysis of the effects of sustainable innovations is not straightforward, and a clear vision on the metrics and approaches to perform this kind of analysis has yet to be defined. Specifically, a primary issue is the difficulty of examining differences in innovation performance between organizations with diverse sustainability goals, as well as sustainable innovations that may be valued differently depending on the development goal (economic, social, environmental) that is taken into account (Montiel and Delgado-Ceballos, 2014). Further, in-depth analysis of the tensions between short-term versus long-term returns from sustainable innovations should be more carefully addressed (Slawinski and Bansal, 2015). In addition, sustainable development is a society-level matter. Thus, it is also important to disentangle the effects that sustainable innovations exert on innovating organizations from those exerted on stakeholders and the entire society, thus shifting the attention from the organizational level to the societal level (Cohen et al., 2008; Longoni and Cagliano, 2016). This includes, for instance, an in-depth consideration of the distribution of the economic, social, and financial merits, mistakes, gains, and losses among all the actors that may have contributed in designing sustainable innovations. In addition, there still remains a considerable uncertainty as to whether sustainable innovations actually lead to a more sustainable society (Hall and Wagner, 2012). According to the foregoing discussion, the guest editors of this special issue welcome high-quality research that deals with the common theme of ‘Sustainable innovation: processes, strategies, and outcomes’. In detail, we encourage papers that examine novel phenomena, employ original methodologies, and offer interesting theoretical and empirical contributions to this research theme. Possible topics include – but are not limited to – the following domains of inquiry: • How to reconcile economic, social, and environmental aspects in innovation activities ○ Does a paradigm shift in the strategy of firms actually occur when they attempt to follow the triple bottom line approach? ○ What are the tensions and paradoxes of managing sustainable innovations? ○ What are the formal (or informal) structures that firms design to manage the definition and implementation of initiatives aimed at the triple bottom approach? ○ Who defines goals related to the triple bottom line approach? ○ What is needed to make the triple bottom line approach more effective (e.g. new culture, communications, supply chain, product, management methods, and organizational structure)? ○ What is the role of openness for sustainable innovation? ○ How are the supply chain and manufacturing organized for sustainable innovation? ○ What aspects of the triple bottom line approach are affected by operations and the supply chain? Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment
Corp. Soc. Responsib. Environ. Mgmt. 25, 106–109 (2018) DOI: 10.1002/csr
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L. Ardito et al.
○ Does the ownership form (e.g. family versus non-family, public versus private) affect firms’ commitment towards sustainable innovation? ○ What environmental and social initiatives are adopted at the plant and supply chain level (energy and water consumption reduction programmes, health and safety programmes, etc.)? ○ What are the differences in the implementation of initiatives/innovations related to one or more sustainability aspects? ○ How are knowledge search strategies managed for sustainable innovation? • The stakeholder management perspective to sustainability in innovation ○ What is the role of firms’ employees in sustaining economic, social, and environmental objectives? ○ Which stakeholders mostly guide the definition of sustainable innovations? ○ What are the practices to reconcile stakeholders’ needs with organizational culture and external requirements while developing sustainable innovations? ○ Which stakeholders should be involved in sustainable innovation choices? ○ How should stakeholders be involved in sustainable innovation choices? ○ Who within the organization should participate in the stakeholder selection? ○ How do managers reconcile the needs of primary and secondary stakeholders? ○ What are the practices to decide how and when given stakeholders can be involved in the innovation process? ○ How do different ownership forms (e.g. family versus non-family, public versus private) influence how firms manage stakeholders in developing sustainable innovation practices? • Social, environmental, and economic impact of sustainable innovation ○ ○ ○ ○ ○
How is it possible to evaluate the performance impacts of sustainable innovations? What are the differences in innovation performance between organizations with diverse sustainability goals? How can we disentangle organizational level effects from societal level effects of sustainable innovations? How do sustainable innovations affect the various stakeholders involved? How do short-term and long-term returns affect sustainable innovation decisions?
Important Dates • • • •
Submission of full papers will open on: 1 December 2017 Manuscript submission deadline: 30 July 2018 Paper in the final version: 31 December 2018 Publication: expected within the year 2019
Paper Submission Procedure • Submission to the special issue should be sent electronically to all Guest Editors before 30 July 2018. • Papers will undergo at least a double-blind, developmental review as per the standard review process followed by Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management. • Final acceptance of approved papers will be contingent on incorporating reviewers’ feedback to the satisfaction of the Guest Editors. • For all additional information, please contact Dr Lorenzo Ardito:
[email protected]. • Submitted papers should not have been previously published nor be currently under consideration for publication elsewhere. • Please kindly read the author guidelines on the journal home page before submitting your manuscript, to ensure that it is consistent with the journal style (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1002/(ISSN)1535-3966/ homepage/ForAuthors.html). Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment
Corp. Soc. Responsib. Environ. Mgmt. 25, 106–109 (2018) DOI: 10.1002/csr
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Corp. Soc. Responsib. Environ. Mgmt. 25, 106–109 (2018) DOI: 10.1002/csr
