Sustainability-Oriented Innovation with Stakeholders: Achieving System Level Impacts

Abstract

Given the centrality of innovation to addressing grand societal challenges, this paper uses a Europe wide data set to identify conditions for sustainability-oriented innovation (SOI). Such challenges cannot be resolved by firms alone but rather in collaboration with stakeholders within the innovation process. Using the focus of ‘doing good by doing new things with others’ we connect the often technical orientation of SOI research to a relational account of stakeholder collaboration in innovation. We operationalise different measures to distinguish innovation leading to incremental or system level impact, bringing the latter to an empirical level. The use of qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) reveals a causal complexity behind SOI. Our findings identify concrete configurations of firm-stakeholder collaboration associated with incremental and system level impact. We demonstrate the influence of timing and stakeholder selection on the innovation outcome. In this way we contribute to understanding how and when collaborating with stakeholders can bolster the system level impacts of innovations and enlighten the future for organisations and institutions faced with grand societal challenges.