Abstract
This paper highlights the mutual relationship and crucial need for sustainability in innovation and vice versa, with a focus on various companies that are leading in this aspect. Together with certain conditions in place, growing awareness of this need has led to these companies achieving groundbreaking progress in embedding sustainability into the new product innovation space via the development of an overarching roadmap supported by strategic partnerships and robust quantitative tools, to proactively expand the sustainability mindset and way of life into the company culture and ways of working. Case studies of these companies are examined, and based on the findings, the paper concludes with recommendations and next steps for businesses to take to succeed in sustainability-centric innovation.
Highlights
Published: 11 June 2021The 20th century has been a period of unprecedented industrial growth and societal advancement, which has led to exponential growth in energy use, natural resource depletion and a rise of varied problems relating to sustainability, especially in the environmental space [1]
Therein lies the challenge for companies to innovate while maintaining sustainable development, by creating real value to enhance products and services while minimizing adverse socio-environmental impacts from business activities. Such innovations are incremental and difficult to achieve, as societal changes are necessary to increase market appetite for sustainable products and services [34]. This is supported by Verganti [43], who criticizes that new product development efforts are typically overwhelmed by new ideas without consideration of which ones are most valued by society from an environmental standpoint
When looking for environmental efficiencies, thinking beyond a function’s existing domain, partners and overall procedures will become second nature to employees, nurturing a working environment where ideation becomes valuable and comprehensive. It is imperative in the current evolution of business that new products and innovations will be the key drivers for growth for any organization
Summary
The 20th century has been a period of unprecedented industrial growth and societal advancement, which has led to exponential growth in energy use, natural resource depletion and a rise of varied problems relating to sustainability, especially in the environmental space [1]. End of what is considered to be genuinely sustainable, and they must know how to critically evaluate a company’s real action towards furthering the sustainability agenda This puts responsibility on companies to communicate fairly and educate consumers about how deceptive and misleading greenwashing advertisements could be. Sustainability provides a performance outcome, quality image perception, input preemption, innovation leadership and economic scale advantage to the company [23] Beyond such benefits, it has challenged companies to re-evaluate their end-to-end value chain to reduce their environmental and social impacts throughout. It has pushed companies to adopt ambitious goals in terms of operations and innovation strategies It has transformed companies’ innovation models to holistically include sustainability parameters encompassing environmental, social and economic aspects.
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