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

Martha Orellano, Christine Lambey-Checchin, Khaled Medini and Gilles Neubert
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Martha Orellano: Altran Technology Engineering Center, 31700 Blagnac, France
Christine Lambey-Checchin: CleRMa, Université Clermont Auvergne, 63000 Clermont-Ferrand, France
Khaled Medini: Mines Saint-Etienne, University Clermont Auvergne, CNRS UMR 6158 LIMOS, 42023 Saint-Étienne, France
Gilles Neubert: Emlyon Business School, CNRS UMR 5600 EVS, 42009 Saint-Étienne, France

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 16, 1-18

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.

Keywords: sustainable innovation; customer-driven innovation; collaboration; decision-aiding; case study research (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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