With our Special Interest Group on Values-Based and Sustainable Innovation we are quite active again at ISPIM Conference in Ljubljana - here (download) the overview of our sessions:  

How to create values-based innovation culture for sustainable business impact? Learn how leading European firms create values-based and sustainable innovation cultures, understand their challenges and proven practices. Share your experiences and learn from those of others! The session will be moderated by Prof. Dr. Henning Breuer and Kiril Ivanov. Based on ethnographic insights on values-based and sustainable innovation barriers and practices within the Erasmus+ Project IMPACT.

In new projects on foresight, we understand sustainability not only as a factor influencing social and corporate development, but also as a requirement and target perspective for value-based innovation.   At the European level, Strategic Foresight for Sustainability combines the traditionally separate areas of strategic foresight, innovation management and sustainability management.   In Germany, the initiative D2030 - Deutschland neu denken e.V. is taking the next step toward the year 2045, when Germany should be climate neutral. What kind of world do we and our children want to live in then? And what do we have to do today to achieve this? How can images of the future help us to facilitate values-based and sustainable innovation today?

At ESCP Business School, Henning enjoyed the honour to teach in the Executive Master program in Future Energy on the Berlin campus. Together with Prof. Dr. Florian Lüdeke-Freund he introduced the class to Values-Based Innovation for Sustainable Value Creation. We took the photovoltaics leasing firm Enpal and its innovation challenges as a case to design new, sustainable business models. Later we had the chance to visit the Berlin central office of Enpal, and we were able to find out first-hand about the status of development and understand the fascinating success story of the young company. Thanks to everyone who contributed!

The first IMPACT Podcast is online: Most companies have adopted some sustainability strategy, but hardly any succeed to turn it into consistent practices. Together with leading European firms we have explored good practices and persisting challenges in our IMPACT project. What happens if organisational culture eats sustainability strategy for breakfast? And what can organisations do to build a values-based innovation culture for sustainable business IMPACT? In order to find out, please enjoy this Podcast with Henninng Breuer and John Bessant on methods and insights from our project. A transcript and further materials are also available at John Bessants site.

‘All our knowledge is about the past, and all our decisions are about the future’ (Ian Wilson 1975). Complementary to ongoing research on sustainable business models, we started to investigate future business models in mobility. At the „1st Public Conference on Strategic Foresight for Sustainability” of the SF4S project in Turku, Henning introduced the facilitated a discussion on “Future Mobility Business Models”.

As part of the Innovation Alliance project SF4S, a series of expert interviews with strategic foresight and sustainability specialists brought Henning back in contact with former colleagues from IZT and other companies. Thank you all for your participation! Five challenging insights from these expert interviews will be presented at the upcoming ISPIM conference: Sustainability as an important but external topic in futures research, a focus on scenarios rather than integrated practices, the emergence of new small-scale formats and methods, challenges of organisational anchoring, and a persisting dominance of exploratory over strategic and normative scenario management approaches. Addressing the last insight, we elaborate upon the methodological approaches using normative scenarios to facilitate futures literacy for values-based and sustainable innovation.

Managing values professionally is a critical success factor for (sustainable) innovation – with implications for business strategy and leadership, consulting and education, as well as entrepreneurship. Following more than two years of inspired writing, intensive discussion, and rigorous reviews, we are happy to announce an Special Issue of the International Journal for Innovation Management, edited by Henning Breuer, Florian Lüdeke-Freund & John Bessant.   We show to what extent values are an inevitable moment of innovation-related activities, requiring contributions from diverse stakeholders in normative, strategic, and operational management dimensions. We illustrate their practicality to promote rather than handicap innovation and clarify their potential to change and assume different meanings rather than being static entities. The explanatory power of a values-based approach, its generative potential, and its emancipatory impact motivate further research and development. The edition contains seven papers:  

  As editors, Henning of UXBerlin as well as his co-editors Florian and John are grateful to the authors for their thought-stimulating contributions and, not least, for their patience during the demanding review process. We also warmly thank those who submitted papers, even though their submissions could not be accepted this time. We are deeply indebted to the many people who found time in their busy days to review the papers that make up this special issue. Carmen Abril, Lara Anne Blasberg, Timo Brunner, Robert Dew, Klaus Fichter, Albrecht Fritzsche, Raz Godelnik, Minna Halme, Jacob Hoerisch, Kiril Ivanov, Jakub Kruszelnicki, Claus Lang-Koetz, Moritz Loock, Joan Manuel F. Mendoza, Alessandro Monti, Inge Oskam, Romana Rauter, Matthias Rauterberg, and Micaela Surchi, we thank you for your generosity, insights and advice. Heartfelt thanks also go out to the organizers of the ISPIM Innovation Conference, namely Lucija Barisic, Iain Bitran and Steffen Conn, for providing us with a platform to deepen interest in this special issue. The discussions we had were stimulating and have gone into making this issue a special one. We also thank Joe Tidd as Managing Editor of the IJIM and his team including Thaheera Althaf and Natalie Wee for the chance to create this Special Issue and for their support. We thank Paul Lauer for his copyediting this editorial paper, as well as our colleagues from the IMPACT project for sponsoring that work.

Good news for e-book readers: Together with Florian Lüdeke-Freund and Lorenzo Massa we published a lavishly designed e-book version of our book on "Sustainable Business Model Design – 45 Patterns". The eBook is fully responsive and looks great on e-book readers, tablets, and smartphones. Working with the 45 patterns is easy and convenient thanks to hundreds of active links and cross-references.     Many thanks to everyone who has supported us on this long journey, especially our design team from Arndt Benedikt, who did a great job in redesigning the book with us for the electronic format!  

For our client, TUEV Nord Mobility, we prepared and opened up an exhibition in Hannover summing up results of our one-year user experience project. In order to fundamentally redesign the main inspection software, we had conducted expert interviews on the future of inspection, 16 ethnographic field interviews with inspection engineers, prototyping and co-creation workshops and user tests with the click-dummies we created. Through posters, journey maps and click-dummies we demonstrated key results and invited a larger audience to provide their feedback. While some of the results are already being implemented to improve the current release, we are looking forward to the redesign next year.     Roman Meier-Andrae, Executive Board Member for Digital Transformation and Disruptive Innovation @TÜV Nord cuts the ribbon for the opening of the exhibition. Together we asked: How will we conduct inspections tomorrow? Which new and intuitive interaction principles does AI-supported software enable us to use? Which important insights from the field must absolutely be present in the application? Which ones are not so important (anymore)? What hardware will we use?   Thanks to our partners Max Celko, Philipp Schreiber, Oliver Feichtinger and Eva Licht who contributed to this outstanding project!