Abstract

Today’s critical success factor for public and private enterprises is their capability to develop, adapt, promote, and successfully manage sustainable innovation processes. Firms that are able to successfully manage sustainable innovation processes can competitively operate in mature markets while refocusing their strategies to open up new markets and target new customer segments. With knowledge becoming the main resource of global firms, the capacity to develop sustainable innovation strategies, cultures, and processes enables firms to capitalize on their strategic human resources and management systems. Sustainable innovation mandates that firms leverage both tacit and explicit resources and the talent of user-innovators and user-entrepreneurs, developing sustainable innovation routines and results. In addition to these traditional requirements, we argue that the firm’s ability to identify, embed, and manage organizational, managerial, and personal values within their cultures provides the core foundation for inspiring, motivating, and energizing creativity and innovation across the firm. Leaders, managers, employees, and users who share these core values, can achieve sustainable innovation. This perspective supports the growing recognition by academics and practitioners for managers to utilize socially-responsible management practices and activities to simultaneously fuel innovation and create a better, more sustainable and more harmonious world.

The aim of this paper is to present and further elaborate a prototype of the “Management by Sustainable Innovational Values” (MSIV) model that was recently published (Brillo, Dolan, & Kawamura, 2014). The MSIV model proposes that sustainable innovation best occurs when certain values are identified, shared, and operationalized across the organization, and, more specifically, when organizational members are passionate about their work because they share emotional values to an even greater degree than economic or social ones. While the MSIV model does not ignore economic and social values as drivers of performance and firm survival, it is argued that sustainable innovation may best occur when emotional values work in conjunction with economic values, and when these values are embedded within the firm’s culture.

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