A Methodological Framework to Support the Sustainable Innovation Development Process: A Collaborative Approach

Abstract

The notion of sustainable innovation (SI) emerged recently in the academic literature and evokes deep changes in organizations’ products, processes, and practices to favour the creation of social and environmental value in addition to economic returns. The development of SI implies a collaborative process that requires the orchestration of several actors and streams of knowledge to be successful. Indeed, companies adopting the SI path need structured methodologies to guide the collaboration process with internal and external actors and support the decision process. Nevertheless, the literature has focused on the analysis of determinants and drivers of sustainable innovation development, while the process perspective has been discussed less. Through an in-depth case study in a large-sized company in France, this article proposes a methodological framework to guide the collaborative process in the early phases of sustainable innovation development. The framework relies on a combination of qualitative research and a multicriteria decision aiding method (AHP). The contributions of this work address two main aspects: (i) the conceptualization of sustainable innovation (SI) and (ii) the collaborative process between internal and external actors to develop SI. Firstly, our study leads to two additional dimensions to complete the concept of SI, traditionally based on the three pillars of sustainability (economic, environmental, and social), by adding the functional and relational dimensions. Secondly, concerning the collaborative process to develop SI, our framework proposes a structured methodology following five steps: definition of the project scope, setting actors’ motivations, defining satisfaction criteria, proposing SI solutions, and performing a decision-aiding process to define the preference profiles of the key actors.

The Collaborative Process of Sustainable Innovations under the Lens of Actor–Network Theory

“…The study links the 'becoming' of SIs to their collaborative process and creates a much better understanding of the development of SIs. It also contributes to reduce the gap of SI theoretical approaches related to collaborative dimensions [6,7,30,118] by using the translation approach of ANT.…”

“…This reassessment leads to the development of sustainable innovations (SIs), defined as innovations that significantly reduce their negative (or improve their positive) economic, environmental, and/or social effects [2,3]. The implications of SIs for managers and organizations are debated within different scientific communities [4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14]. One question raised during these debates, which should help managers better structure the SI journey, is what a SI should be or what characteristics should it have to ensure sustainability dimensions.…”

“…First, according to scholars, the debate on SIs must evolve from a teleological to an ontological perspective, which remains a gap in the literature [6][7][8][18][19][20][21][22][23][24]. The teleological perspective strengthens the conceptual debate because it questions the purpose of SIs, which is linked to their characteristics.…”

“…In other words, to know what an SI should be, we must first understand how it is becoming an SI. Second, the development of SIs is complex and risky due to their characteristics and processes, which involves multiple actors with diverse interests or demands [7,8,14,[25][26][27][28][29]. Therefore, the development of SIs will depend on the successful management of these demands during the collaborative process.…”

Construction Risk Evaluation of Poor Geological Channels Based on Cloud Model-Improved AHP–Matter–Element Theory

“…Among them, the analytic hierarchy process is widely used in various fields due to its simple operation and concise system. For example, it is used for collaborative evaluation in the company's operation management [26]; in software-defined networks, it is used for controller selection [27]; in the design of urban tourism routes, it is used to evaluate tourism resources [28]; it is used to evaluate the importance of active power in research [29]; it is also employed to select the most suitable city when solving spatial problems [30], etc. However, the analytic hierarchy process also has its shortcomings that it cannot solve the comprehensive evaluation problem of multi-person decision-making conflicts.…”