Grand Societal Challenges Research Articles

Grand challenges facing our cities: where construction management research meets the urban field

Across the world, urban environments of all sizes and development stages require to engage with the current and future grand societal challenges, and for this to be achieved more integrated develop...

Building the UK vision of a driverless future: A Parliamentary Inquiry case study

The UK Government has endorsed the case for autonomous vehicle (AV) technology and its economic benefits in its industrial strategies since 2013. In late 2016 the Science and Technology Committee in the House of Lords (the legislature’s upper chamber) conducted an Inquiry into the policy. We conduct a content analysis of the text corpus of the Inquiry. Drawing from theories of sociotechnical change we explore how it contributes to building a vision of a future AV world embedded in a national economic and technological project. The technology is framed as a solution to societal grand challenges and the Inquiry corpus is dominated by actors committed to the project. Alternative visions, including sceptical interpretations, are present in the corpus, but rare, reflecting the selection process for contributions to the Inquiry. Predominantly, the corpus represents the public as deficient: dangerous drivers, unaware of promised benefits and unduly anxious about the unfamiliar. Their views are marginal in this Parliamentary Inquiry’s findings. AV technology is one of several possible means to pursue wider mobility policy goals of greater safety, affordability, access and sustainability. Our analysis suggests that the pursuit of an AV future risks becoming a goal in itself instead of a means to these broader societal goals.

Grand challenges in developing countries: Context, relationships, and logics

Grand challenges in developing countries: Context, relationships, and logics

Learning for transitions: An experiential learning strategy for urban experiments

Urban experimentation has been increasingly applied as an urban development tool for finding new ways to face grand societal challenges, as they unfold in cities. Experiments might trigger systemic change, since they differ conceptually from conventional urban development, as they can be radical in ambition, limited in scope, and place emphasis on learning from real-world interventions. However, while there seems to be a common understanding of the importance of learning through urban experiments, there seems to remain a lack of, or unclarity on, learning and reflectivity in the practice of urban experimentation. This paper aims to provide principles for developing more explicit, testable, and improvable learning strategies in urban experimentation by addressing the following question: How to foster learning for transitions through urban experiments? For this, insights from transition studies and experiential learning theory (Kolb, 1984) were used, resulting in a synthesized strategy for learning for transitions through experimentation.

Managing Grand Challenges: Theoretical, Empirical, and Methodological Perspectives

An important emerging question in strategy and organization literature is how do managers navigate their firms through increasing levels of environmental uncertainty and ambiguity. Such rising levels of uncertainty and ambiguity are particularly associated with grand societal challenges, including climate change, the dramatic increase of socially divisive forces, inequality, and social unrest, and, most recently, global pandemics. The objective of this symposium is to address theoretically, empirically, and methodologically the question of how firms can manage such complexities and, at the same time, help tackling grand challenges.

Cross-Sectoral Partnerships for Social Impact: Synergetic interactions in and around partnerships

Cross-sectoral partnerships have been highlighted as a key mechanism to deliver the promise of the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and are acknowledged to play a crucial role in addressing complex and grand societal challenges. Realising and sustaining effective cross-sectoral partnerships is often necessary, but also challenging. This Symposium contributes to the growing knowledge of cross-sectoral partnerships by focusing on the role of synergistic interactions in and around a focal cross-sectoral partnership. As most research on cross-sectoral partnerships has focused on a focal partnership, less attention has been devoted to the role of synergistic interactions - defined as the interactions with additional actors (partner or broker) that produce a combined effect greater than the sum of their separate effects, in and around a focal cross-sectoral partnership. Understanding the role of synergies in realizing, sustaining and even scaling cross-sectoral partnerships, going beyond a focal partnership, is important from both theoretical and practical standpoints. This Symposium fosters research and debate around these issues, showcasing pioneering empirical studies that shed light on how these synergies help realize, sustain and even scale cross-sectoral partnerships (CSPs) for social impact. Harnessing the hype: Coverting the cultural momentum of impact investing into lasting social change Presenter: Matthew Grimes; Cambridge Judge Business School Presenter: Danielle Logue; U. of Technology, Sydney Collective convening: Organizational and interorganizational-level tensions in joint CSP formation Presenter: Iteke Van Hille; Vrije U. Amsterdam Presenter: Frank G.A. De Bakker; IESEG School of Management Presenter: Julie E. Ferguson; U. of Amsterdam Presenter: Peter Groenewegen; Leeds U. Business School Working across institutional boundaries:Fostering ambiguity to enact a generative collaboration spac Presenter: Anne-Laure Fayard; New York U. Presenter: Anne-Claire Pache; ESSEC Business School Cross-Sector Partnerships and Scaling Hybrid Organizations: The Case of Unjani Clinics Presenter: Ilze Kivleniece; INSEAD Presenter: Vikas A. Aggarwal; INSEAD Presenter: Anna Szerb; INSEAD

Organising and Governing for Collective Social Good

In recent times, there is a growing demand for firms to develop their innovations in a way that could support UN’s SDGs or societal Grand Challenges. The governance of firms’ corporate social activities, such as financial donations vs playing an active role, has been often explained as dependent on the type of firm resources used (generic vs specific) and how these activities can enhance a firm's performance. There is a lack of attention towards if, and how, the nature and type of social project can influence the extent of firm's engagement and its governance choices. Building on the governance literature, which accounts for both the capability and transaction costs considerations of firms, we conceptualize firms’ governance decision of social good as dependent on the structure of the social project addressing a social problem as well as firm’s resources required to support that problem. Empirically, we explore this issue through an in-depth qualitative case study of an incumbent firm and examining the relationship dynamics with six of its key social projects. Our findings highlight that the structure of the social project allows for a firm to decide ex-ante its potential role and extent of involvement, and the costs and capabilities associated with the involvement guides the governance choices associated with the potential role a firm can play within a social project. In doing so, we highlight the contexts where a firm may foster collective participation of their value-chain partners in the design and provision of social good.

Antecedents and Practices of External Goal Adoption: The Case of Social Ventures and the UN SDGs

As societal grand challenges become more pressing, organizations are exposed to a normative con-text of increasing ethical, social, and environmental concerns of stakeholders and related calls to take greater responsibility in tackling global problems. With the introduction of the Sustainable De-velopment Goals (SDGs), organizations world-wide are now confronted with a set of predefined, external sustainability goals at the institutional level. The SDGs thereby offer the chance to mobilize and engage stakeholders to work together towards common societal goals, especially in the case of organizations such as social entrepreneurial ventures (SEVs) that place societal goals at the center of their organizational practices. In this study, we explore how SEVs enact SDGs in practices of goal adoption. Drawing on a qualitative study of 35 SEVs, our findings reveal four distinct ap-proaches: resisted, necessity-driven, pragmatic, and strategy-making goal adoption. Across these approaches, we find distinct ethical reasoning as a motivation informing goal adoption and link it to the orientation of collaborative efforts. In doing so, our study contributes to theory on organization-al goals by explaining how some organizations adopt external goals from institutional sources (while others do not) and by delineating how external goal adoption materializes differently in or-ganizational practices.

Sustainable Human Resource Management for Improved Environmental Performance

In this study, we examine the role that different types of human resource management (HRM) practices play on firms’ environmental performance. We develop a model to evaluate the influence of managers’ environmental performance evaluations and two types of internal corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices (socially responsible employee benefits and corporate volunteering practices) on organizations’ environmental performance. In doing so, we go beyond the green HRM framework, which focuses on practices specifically designed to address environmental concerns, and we start integrating other aspects of the larger sustainable HRM area to improve our understanding of the effect of HRM practices on firms’ environmental outcomes. To accomplish our goal, we analyze a sample of 142 manufacturing companies that have gone through B Lab’s Impact Assessment process, one of the few independent certifications of social and environmental responsibility available to small and medium businesses. The results show that managers’ performance evaluations on environmental goals not only have a direct impact on firms’ environmental performance, but also strengthen the positive effect of environmental management practices on performance. Findings also support the influence of both types of internal CSR practices on environmental performance, which opens the door to explore whether and how different types of internal CSR have an effect on firms’ environmental performance. Our study advances recent work on societal grand challenges in the field of management, pointing to specific people management practices by which businesses can move from being part of the environmental problem to being part of the solution.

Relational Practices For Tackling Grand Challenges: The Relational Society Project

The overall aim of this symposium is to stage a debate that enlightens our understanding of how relational practices are established and developed in response to highly diverse, multi-level, complex societal challenges. This symposium is inspired by an ongoing, comparative case study where data are being gathered from nine sites around the world (in China, Pakistan, Nigeria, UK, US, Denmark and Norway) in order to learn more about the relational practices being used to tackle grand societal challenges, such as the current pandemic as it intersects with growing inequality and health disparities. Findings from the comparative case study is to be followed by an interventional phase starting Fall 2021. This symposium will discuss relevant methodological issues that arise when conducting ethnographic comparative case studies across diverse settings, and will inform the design of the interventions to be adopted.

Delineating Impact Investing: A Bibliometric Review

Nomenclature like impact investing, ethical investing, and responsible investing have grown quickly in recent years as investors explore the nexus between financial, environmental, and social returns. However, a common topic of debate in both academic and grey literature is establishing definitional clarity around the motivations and applications of each form of investment strategy. Adopting recent advancements in quantitative textual analysis and bibliometrics this study explores the current status of these related but disparate fields of research, by analyzing the metadata of 929 publications. We argue that impact investing, due to its emphasis on intentionality, multi-criteria decision-making, and incommensurability of values, is particularly well suited to address grand societal challenges like poverty, well-being, and climate change. However, impact investing remains a nascent subfield of social finance. We conclude that impact investing research should adopt bespoke theoretical frameworks to advance the field of study.

Governing varieties of mission-oriented innovation policies: A new typology

AbstractMany governments in Europe and beyond have subscribed to mission-oriented innovation policies (MOIPs), aiming to steer innovation systems to directly address grand societal challenges. The emerging diversity of MOIPs, however, creates difficulties to define this approach and assess its effectiveness and efficiency. In this paper, we propose a new typology for MOIPs. It consists of four ideal types of missions and extends the established dichotomy of transformer and accelerator missions. The framework emphasizes the role of the state in MOIPs, drawing attention to the implementation process and governance requirements as key features of mission implementation. A first application across the diverse missions of the German Hightech Strategy 2025 demonstrates the analytical value of the framework and allows identifying type-specific challenges. In sum, the new typology and its operationalization improve the understanding of MOIPs and enhance the possibilities for systematic comparisons and impact assessments.

Stakeholder Governance for Responsible Innovation: A Theory of Value Creation, Appropriation, and Distribution

AbstractIn the face of intractable societal grand challenges, organizations increasingly resort to responsible innovation – that is, they pledge to create value for multiple stakeholders through developing new products or services that avoid doing harm and improve conditions for people and the planet. While the link between responsible innovation and societal improvements has been established, organizations pursuing responsible innovation lack governance mechanisms to guide the allocation of the value created – both economic and social – among heterogeneous stakeholders, in line with their responsible intent. We combine the value‐based strategy and stakeholder perspectives and infuse a deliberative process to design a three‐stage model of value allocation that rests on three key organizational decisions: i) what value to create and for whom, ii) how to appropriate the value created vis‐à‐vis unintended value appropriators, and iii) how to distribute the value appropriated among intended stakeholders. We propose a framework of stakeholder governance comprised of four novel mechanisms by which organizations can allocate value among their multiple principal stakeholders as part of participative processes. Our study contributes to responsible innovation and corporate governance research by unpacking how new value is managed to solve societal grand challenges.

It Requires More Than Intelligence to Solve Consequential World Problems.

What are consequential world problems? As “grand societal challenges”, one might define them as problems that affect a large number of people, perhaps even the entire planet, including problems such as climate change, distributive justice, world peace, world nutrition, clean air and clean water, access to education, and many more. The “Sustainable Development Goals”, compiled by the United Nations, represent a collection of such global problems. From my point of view, these problems can be seen as complex. Such complex problems are characterized by the complexity, connectivity, dynamics, intransparency, and polytely of their underlying systems. These attributes require special competencies for dealing with the uncertainties of the given domains, e.g., critical thinking. My position is that it is not IQ, but complex problem-solving competencies for dealing with complex and dynamic situations, that is important for handling consequential global problems. These problems require system competencies, i.e., competencies that go beyond analytical intelligence, and comprise systems understanding as well as systems control. Complex problem solving is more than analytic intelligence.

Digital social innovation: An overview and research framework

Digital social innovation: An overview and research framework

New directions for RIS studies and policies in the face of grand societal challenges

ABSTRACT The regional innovation system (RIS) approach has become a widely used framework for examining the dynamics of innovation across space and for crafting policies to promote the innovation capacity of regions. The dominant focus has been on technological and business innovation enhancing competitiveness and economic growth. In light of persistent environmental and social challenges such as climate change, aging and growing inequalities, this understanding appears to be too narrow. We argue that the RIS approach requires a critical reassessment for informing the next generation of regional innovation policies. We explore how RIS scholarship and policies could benefit from an alternative understanding of the innovation process. Inspired by recent work on mission-oriented and transformative innovation policies, we develop the notion of ‘challenge-oriented RISs’ (CoRISs). In contrast to conventional understandings of RISs, this approach embraces a more critical view of innovation, captures the directionality of change, opens up to new innovation actors at different territorial scales and pays more attention to the application side and upscaling of innovation within the region and beyond. Acknowledging that regions vary in their capacity for transformative change and challenge-oriented innovation, the article outlines new directions for place-based innovation policies.

Responsible Leadership and the Reflective CEO: Resolving Stakeholder Conflict by Imagining What Could be done

In light of grand societal challenges, most recently the global Covid-19 pandemic, there is a call for research on responsible leadership. While significant advances have been made in recent years towards a better understanding of the concept, a gap exists in the understanding of responsible leadership in emerging countries, specifically how leaders resolve prevalent moral dilemmas. Following Werhane (1999), we use moral imagination as an analytical approach to analyze a dilemmatic stakeholder conflict (between indigenous communities in rural India and an emerging market multinational enterprise headquartered in the same country) through the lense of different responsible leadership mindsets and in light of different ethical principles and moral background theories. Based on this analysis, we arrive at a tentative moral judgement, concluding that the instrumental approach is morally inferior and recommending the integrative approach as the morally superior choice. In the subsequent discussion—focussed on what “could” (instead of “should”) be done, we apply the integrative script and use moral imagination as a pathway for generating morally justifiable solutions. Through this analysis, we provide novel insights on how to apply an integrative responsible leadership approach to a stakeholder conflict situation, using the single case study to expand the responsible leadership discussion to emerging markets.

Building Responsible Innovation in International Organizations through Intrapreneurship

AbstractResponsible innovation to address grand societal challenges has become the raison d’être of international organizations, such as the United Nations. Although these entities are established to act responsibly, they struggle to innovate. Acknowledging the tensions of this unique context, this study applies an inductive research methodology drawing on eight case studies of intrapreneurial initiatives in socially oriented organizations. The initiatives originated in country offices and scaled either organically (country‐by‐country) or strategically (via headquarters). This distinguishes two ways how the initiatives mitigate different responsible innovation tensions to foster competence development, structural alignment, and mission stretch. The findings add to the literatures on responsible innovation and intrapreneurship in large, complex organizations by uncovering the boundary conditions of non‐profit intrapreneurship, its tensions, and its scaling processes. This study builds theory that intrapreneurial initiatives can foster digital transformation and contribute to the development of an organizational capability for responsible innovation via organizational imprinting.

Evidence-based narratives in European research programming

The article introduces and exemplifies the approach of evidence-based narratives (EBN). The methodology is a product of co-design between policy-making and science, generating robust intelligence for evidence-based policy-making in the Directorate General for Research and Innovation of the European Commission (DG RTD) under the condition of high uncertainty and fragmented evidence. The EBN transdisciplinary approach tackles practical problems of future-oriented policy-making, in this case in the area of programming for research and innovation addressing the Grand Societal Challenge related to climate change and natural resources. Between 2013 and 2018, the EU-funded RECREATE project developed 20 EBNs in a co-development process between scientists and policy-makers. All EBNs are supported with evidence about the underlying innovation system applying the technological innovation systems (TIS) framework. Each TIS analysis features the innovation, its current state of market diffusion and a description of the innovation investment case. Indicators include potential future market sizes, effects on employment and environmental and social benefits. Based on the innovation and TIS function analyses, the EBNs offer policy recommendations. The article ends with a critical discussion of the EBN approach.

(Invited) Hydrogel Bio-Electronics and Bio-Optics

Whereas human tissues and organs are mostly soft, wet and bioactive; machines are commonly hard, dry and biologically inert. Merging humans, machines and their intelligence is of imminent importance in addressing grand societal challenges in health, sustainability, security, education and joy of living. However, interfacing humans and machines is extremely challenging due to their fundamentally contradictory properties. At MIT Zhao Lab, we exploit soft materials technology to form long-term, high-efficacy, multi-modal interfaces and convergence between humans and machines. In particular, hydrogels with similar mechanical and physiological properties as various biological tissues have been explored as an ideal material candidate for such human-machine interfaces and convergence. This talk will focus on Hydrogel Bio-electronics and Bio-optics. I will first discuss the general principles to design hydrogels to possess extraordinary mechanical, electrical and optical properties. I will then introduce a 3D printing method for the fabrication of various hydrogel bio-electronic and bio-optic devices, including wearable, ingestible and implanted devices. Thereafter, I will discuss in vivo tests on the long-term biocompatibility, functionalities, and efficacy of the hydrogel bio-electronics and bio-optics in rat and pig models. I will conclude the talk with a perspective on future human-machine convergence enabled by soft materials technology.