Big Idea: Leading Sustainable Organizations

Sustainability-Oriented Innovation: The More the Merrier

SOI extends beyond private and corporate problem solving.

Jason Jay, Sergio Gonzalez, and Marine Gerard Reading Time: 9 min 

Topics

Leading Sustainable Organizations

Corporate adoption of sustainable business practices is essential to a strong market environment and an enduring society. What does it mean to become a sustainable business and what steps must leaders take to integrate sustainability into their organization?
More in this series
Sustainability-Oriented Innovation SOI

By establishing centers of excellence and communities of practice, SOI can build networks of problem solvers to manage socially complex issues.

This blog post is the third in a four-post series on Sustainability-Oriented Innovation (SOI). See the first post, “Sustainability-Oriented Innovation: A Bridge to Breakthroughs,” for our definition and overview, and the second post, “Why Sustainability-Oriented Innovation Is Valuable in Every Context,” for a discussion of different types of SOI and the ways companies are using it. Our work builds on Accelerating the Theory and Practice of Innovation by Jason Jay and Marine Gerard. In this post, we address the wide variety of roles for SOI, why complex challenges require diverse networks, and the idea of SOI centers of excellence (CoEs) and SOI communities of practice (CoPs) to facilitate the establishment of those networks. We hope to catalyze our idea of developing a global network of CoEs and CoPs at MIT’s upcoming Sustainability Summit.

It takes a combination of fortitude and ingenuity to tackle sustainability issues. Not only are sustainability issues technically complex, requiring a knowledge of systems thinking, they are also managerially and socially complex. Sustainability-Oriented Innovation (SOI) involves managing a diverse set of stakeholders often not associated with other forms of innovation. Because of this, SOI leaders may benefit from centers of excellence (CoEs) and communities of practice (CoPs) that will help navigate that complexity and stakeholder diversity.

The typical innovation process is driven by stakeholders seeking to solve a private problem. For example, key players in the high-frequency trading industry were the first to invest in new microwave technology that shaved 2.3 milliseconds off order-transmission time between New York and Chicago.1 That innovation gave these early adopters a tremendous competitive advantage over the rest of the industry. With the development of laser transmission a few years later, the industry’s technological arms race bolted forward again.2

The SOI process, however, is not only limited to private-problem stakeholders. Because it involves consideration of the social and environmental impacts of the innovation across its life cycle and its wider systemic effects, it also includes public-problem stakeholders.

Consider the example of 1366 Technologies, a company that aims to increase the efficiency of multi-crystalline solar photovoltaic (PV) wafer manufacturing.

Topics

Leading Sustainable Organizations

Corporate adoption of sustainable business practices is essential to a strong market environment and an enduring society. What does it mean to become a sustainable business and what steps must leaders take to integrate sustainability into their organization?
More in this series

About the Authors

Jason Jay is a Senior Lecturer and Director of the Sustainability Initiative at MIT Sloan. Sergio Gonzalez is a graduate student in the MIT Technology and Policy Program. Marine Gerard is a 2014 graduate of the MIT Sloan School of Management currently working as an associate at the Boston Consulting Group.

References

1. A. Troianovski, “Networks Built on Milliseconds: Microwaves—Not Fiber Optics—Are Latest Thing for High-Frequency Traders,” The Wall Street Journal (May 30, 2012). www.wsj.com

2. S. Patterson, “High-Speed Stock Traders Turn to Laser Beams: Anova to Use Laser Devices for Fast Communication of Market Data,” The Wall Street Journal (February 12, 2014). www.wsj.com

3. J. Jay and M. Gerard, “Accelerating the Theory and Practice of Sustainability-Oriented Innovation,” MIT Sloan Research Paper No. 5148-15 (July 10, 2015).

4. A.M. Bankson, “MIT Sloan MBA students found Spoiler Alert app to match surplus food inventory with those in need,” MIT News (May 29, 2015); news.mit.edu

5. J.C. Buzby, H.F. Wells, and J. Hyman, “The Estimated Amount, Value, and Calories of Postharvest Food Losses at the Retail and Consumer Levels in the United States. Economic Information Bulletin No. 121 (February 2014), USDA Economic Research Service.

6. D. Gunders, National Resources Defense Council. “Wasted: How America Is Losing Up to 40 Percent of Its Food from Farm to Fork to Landfill.” NRDC Issue Paper 12-06-B (August 2012). https://www.nrdc.org.

7. Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection, “Summary Analysis of Massachusetts Commercial/Institutional Food Waste Generation Data,” n.d., http://www.mass.gov/eea/docs/.

8. Massachusetts Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs, “Commercial Food Waste Disposal Ban,” (October 1, 2014). http://www.mass.gov/eea/.

9. Jay and Gerard, “Accelerating the Theory and Practice of Sustainability-Oriented Innovation”.

10. Ibid.

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Comments (2)
jerustates
The problem and the process itself may be private, but if an organization uses an innovation platform (such as http://qmarkets.net for example) - it keeps everything private, while funneling and processing hundreds and thousands of ideas simultaneously. No privacy is breached and the innovation process is empowered by the wisdom of the crowd (employees, managers, etc)
Nik Zafri Abdul Majid
I have read all your wonderful articles on Sustainability Oriented Innovation.

I think that SOI is a continuous improvement to Conventional Innovation - however not to mean that the latter is unsuitable or incompatible. Conventional Innovation is still relevant to growing corporations. Once CI is sound, then the corporation should move further (sort of diversify) towards SOI.

SOI defines corporate governance is a bigger perspective. It is a win-win situation and is definitely more transparent.

SOI shall be the future to innovation and the way forward for corporations.