Leadership Innovation, prof Canterino, by Cremaschi

5.3 Sustainability oriented innovation

"The establishment of new products, services, processes, business models where environmental, social, and economic goals are their foundations"

"The process where sustainability considerations (environmental, social, and financial) are integrated into company systems from idea generation through to research and development (R&D) and commercialization"

Highlights:

• The outcome of the innovation process displays sustainability
• There is a purposefulness in including sustainability criteria in the innovation process
• Simultaneous creation of economic and social value
• The concept applies to technologies, products, services (and product-service systems), as well as new business and organizational models

Possible areas for sustainable innovation:

Advantages of sustainable innovation:

1. Innovation acts as a persuasive means to cope with economic trade-offs of sustainability
2. ...

Sustainability Oriented Innovation Dimensions

Business model innovations for sustainability are defined as:

socialimpact inside a business operation is not necessarily cost neutral. It is fundamental to build into the canvasa clear picture of the social objectives. The business model canvas should provide an opportunity to see notjust the business, but also to identify the social impact they are trying to achieve. And importantly, to seeclearly how the two interact.

305.4 Sustainable vs conventional innovationSOIs are more likely to have multidimensional objectives, they involve a higher level of complexity anduncertainty and are fundamentally riskier. SOIs generally require more collaborative and/or open systemapproaches and the involvement of a number of different actors, especially non-conventional ones,including customers, NGOs, and other stakeholders such as local communities.

Stakeholders involvement: we have more stakeholders which leads to challenges!

Cross-Sector collaborations:Collaborations between corporations and social enterprises. They involve the formation of a

Political-economic arrangement that seeks to reconcile wealth creation with social justice, and the efficient functioning of markets with the welfare of communities:

• Social enterprises build relationships with corporations in order to improve their viability as businesses.
• Collaborations with social enterprises represent an alternative to independent corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives.

Social enterprises' exchange value is rooted in their local knowledge, social capital and social legitimacy, while corporations' exchange value is rooted in their commercial knowledge, financial capital and market legitimacy. The contrasting features of each partner make collaborations between them distinctive. Differences in corporations' and social enterprises' goals, ownership structures, governance mechanisms and lines of accountability lead to tensions.

Large firms - Start-ups collaborations business models: 316.0 Creativity6.1 Creativity and creative

1. processFiltering: from many ideas we select just a few according to some constraints that we impose. For example, the economic feasibility.
2. Tunnelling: the better ideas are sped up. It is important to decide different characteristics, e.g. how large is the first phase, the filtering entity etc.
3. The process of innovation is aimed at launching a new product into the market. It is a set of coordinated activities to create a new product that has value for the customer. Combining new and existing knowledge to offer a solution to the problem of innovation. The key challenge is funnelling, balancing costs and risks.

The drivers to manage the innovation process as a funnel are:

• Organization: the structure and knowledge/skill management
• Measurement: measuring innovation capabilities and outputs.
• Culture: People and leadership
• Tools: methods and technologies supporting innovation

Understanding and managing creativity is key for ideas generation. What science tells us about

individual creativity: brain itself is a creative entity, because it processes data. Creativity is a process involving imagination and ability to develop something new and unique, by combining knowledge, creative skills and motivation.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

6.2 Creative teams

Creativity, most of the time, involves some degree of social interaction. Creativity seems to occur at the collective level or what some referred to as a small groups of individuals and/or teams (such as project teams) that work together. Most creative ideas within the context of work are the outcomes of exchanges in a collective space, when individuals interact with one another and trigger ideas for one another through dialogue, debate and conflict.

Under certain conditions teams can achieve synergy – a group solution superior to that of the most accurate member's solution:

• Pool of knowledge of the group > Sum of the individual knowledge
• Individuals build on others' ideas and produce new

IdeaCreativity is a function of the right idea at the right time.

Threats to team creativity:

1. Conformity: Apprehension to express ideas because of other's judgment
2. Production Blocking: Members of a team may be prevented from generating new ideas because they are distracted by hearing the contributions of other members while waiting for their turn to participate (interruption of the flow)
3. Performance Matching: The performance of people working within a group tends to converge over time

Enhancing team creativity:

1. Clear "rules" and instructions:
   • Set high-quantity goals: fix a number of ideas, even absurd ideas.
   • Competition
   • Focus on categories
   • Increase individual accountability
   • Energizing states
   • Analogical reasoning (look for interdisciplinarity)
2. Techniques:
   • Brainstorming
   • Brainwriting
   • Feedback
   • Nominal Group Technique
   • Delphi Technique
   • ..
3. Diversification and Networking
   • Different roles

• Fluid membership: flexible groups
• Organizational Networking: Creative groups with external actors

6.3 Creative organizations: Disney Pixar

Context

When Disney acquired Pixar in 2006, Ed Catmull (Pixar President) and John Lasseter (Pixar Chief Creative Officer) were asked to also take on leadership of Disney Pixar Animation. Disney adopted most of the practices of Pixar, changing the work structure and the physical space to promote effective creative teamwork.

STRUCTURES:

• "Flatter" organization, less hierarchy
• Small autonomous teams, focused on a particular specialty
  • Team Lead: an expert with strong vision
  • Primary and Secondary Team membership
• "Diversified" management group
• Relocation of workspaces
  • Members of a team close to each other
  • Casual meeting spaces
  • Different office space layouts

PROCESSES & PROCEDURES

• Team meetings
  • To foster informal communication (output: list of tasks)
  • System staff

• meeting
• Dailies
• Experimentation ("fail as quick as you can")
• Top management "Taking a back seat"
• Roadmaps showing goals of each team
• "Post‐it" calendar showing events

VALUES (COGNITIVE LEVEL)

• "Open" communication
• Collaborative environment freedom of expression
• "Honest" and transparent approach, also with customers

6.4 Creative leaders

On one hand scientific studies support the thesis that creativity is fostered by people‐oriented, participating, transformational, empowering leadership approaches. On the other hand, there is evidence of effectiveness of more task‐oriented/autocratic/directive styles

"CONTINGENCY" leadership: there is no a "one‐best‐way" leadership when managing creativity

6.5 Techniques to foster creativity

• Enlarge the scope of knowledge
• Create new connections
• Morphological analysis: We create different scenarios and

• most voted idea is implemented
• Six hats for thinking
• Delphi Technique
• Create the unexpected (serendipity)
• Understand the unexpected
• Create a proper organizational context

CONCEPT GENERATION TOOLS

Concept generation tools can increase the probability to transform an idea in a concept because:

• Force to reflect on meanings and values connected to the new idea
• Force to analyse the new idea from the user perspective
• Reduce the problems connected to internal communication

The tools are aimed to represent, formalize and visualize, at different stages of development, a solution involving numerous actors in a complex interaction process. The main concept generation tools are:

• Personas (or User/Stakeholder Profiling)