Sustainable Innovation Cultures

How can companies and nonprofit organizations turn sustainability strategies into real-world practice? How can they innovate to gain a competitive edge while contributing to sustainable and regenerative development? And where should you as an innovation, sustainability or human resource manager begin?

There is a saying that it takes a village to raise a child. Similarly, it takes a whole culture to achieve sustainable innovation in a repeatable and reliable manner. In this first comprehensive work on sustainable innovation cultures, the authors show how organizational culture translates sustainability-related values into environmentally, socially and economically valuable outcomes. By aligning sustainability literacy with appropriate practices and mediating artefacts (including those of artificial intelligence), virtuous circles of targeted output, valuable outcomes and desired impacts can be created. There are three stages of activity crucial if an organization is to grow a sustainable innovation culture—namely conceiving, co-creating, and cultivating. First understand and specify the organization’s values, tensions and values-action gaps, then co-create targeted interventions, and finally cultivate sustainable innovation practices and methods. This framework and its practices and methods are based on a comprehensive literature review, expert interviews and ethnographic field studies in transformational companies across Europe with a global presence. Case studies and examples illustrate each of the 32 practices and 36 methods described in the book. The companion site offers extensive training, educational media and materials such as card sets, videos, podcasts and slide decks for practitioners and educators. Academic syllabi as well as certified educational materials and university modules are available on an open access basis.

Author Biography

Henning Breuer consults, researches and teaches in the fields of innovation management and business psychology. He is founder of UXBerlin – Innovation Consulting and a professor for business and media psychology at Media University of Applied Sciences Berlin. Since 2001, Henning has worked with multinational corporations, SMEs, public organizations and start-ups to provide advice on sustainable innovation culture, business models, future scenarios and ethnographic research. He has co-authored numerous journal and conference publications and books on sustainable business model design, gamification for innovators and entrepreneurs, and values-based innovation management. As a visiting researcher and professor, he has worked at the University of Chile (Santiago) and Waseda University (Tokyo). He studied psychology, philosophy and law in Berlin and Tübingen, and received his PhD in psychology from the University of Magdeburg.

Kiril Ivanov is completing a doctorate at the Centre for Sustainability Management at the Leuphana University, Lüneburg, with a dissertation focused on values-based and sustainable innovation practices and facilitation methods. As a researcher at the Media University of Applied Sciences, he has contributed to EU-funded research projects on gamification (GAMIFY), values-based innovation cultures (IMPACT), and strategic foresight for sustainability (SF4S). He teaches courses in innovation and entrepreneurship, business anthropology, and gamification for organisations, while also collaborating with UXBerlin – Innovation Consulting on projects involving values-based business modelling and ethnography.