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The dead end of classical innovation management and unsustainable innovation
Innovation management emerged as an academic field, raising considerable attention among scholars and practitioners. So far, most inquiries on these matters concentrate on innovation generation, process management, and application diffusion, with little emphasis on sustainability and societal aspects. In turn, sustainable development approaches became mostly standalone research fields with little overlap with the management of innovation-related activities, commonly labelled ‘innovation management’.
During the last decades, innovation management more and more followed the user-driven approach first named by Eric von Hippel in the early 2000s. However, the pure focus on users often fails to develop a systemic perspective that accounts for applications and external effects associated with social, societal, and environmental impact. The failure stems from the fact that the individual is aware of the external effects but considers personal well-being first, assuming that others will care about these effects. Thus, innovation management focuses on the individual user (customer) needs in the first instance with some more or less modest adjustment to the external effects on others.
Also, companies carefully monitor innovation projects, employing sophisticated controlling instruments that force innovation managers to pay more attention to economic indicators. Thus, innovation management perceives ‘sustainability’ traditionally as the aim of achieving lasting revenues resulting from innovation activities but less in the sense of meeting grand challenges or tackling environmental issues purposefully. While we recognize the exceptional companies that align their business model closely to environmental needs abroad, environmental or grand challenges-driven innovation management is hardly implemented in many companies' innovation management. This failure generates a myopic view of how technological innovation can be achieved vis-à-vis the grand challenges we face collectively.