“Values-based business models for sustainable value creation” is the title of the upcoming keynote at ABSRC conference in Ljubljana. Innovative companies with commitments to strong core values are also more successful economically in the long term than those driven by market opportunities. But how can we ensure that new products and services not only create added value by meeting short-term needs, but are also aligned with what different stakeholders such as company employees, customers, suppliers and societal stakeholders a better business models, and answers questions like: Why does a car have little to do with mobility? Why should we never need to buy another light bulb again? And how can small things make a big difference?

‘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!

Title: Values-Based Business Models for Sustainable Value Creation. Following up upon a short report on values-based innovation and sustainable business modelling in the last edition of Service Today, editor Michael Braun interviewed Henning for the final 2022 edition. We covered 10 years of research and consulting work on values-based business models and sustainable value creation, starting from the increased awareness of the pivotal role of values for innovation, stepping into multidimensional value creation, and up to the recent works of managing IMPACT and with suitable tools and methods.     Here you find the original German text. If you are interested in the full edition of the magazine, please send us a message. Thank you, Michael, for enabling this nice short review of innovation and consulting highlights from 10 years!

How can we facilitate the transition to a more sustainable digital ecocomy? In this panel discussion (here the video) at the Bits & Baeume Conference at Technical University Berlin, Christian Kroll from Ecosia, Laura Niessen from Maastricht University (Netherlands), Iana Nesterova from Umeå University (Sweden), Maike Gossen (from TU Berlin) and Henning Breuer of UXBerlin discussed how to move from a monodimensional growth paradigm to a new awareness of human values as directives for business development and an accordingly multidimensional pursuit and assessment of value creation and success. You can also follow the discussion on LinkedIn.

Together with European Telecommunication, Railway and Energy companies we are contributing to the sustainability-oriented development of the emerging 5G telecomunnication ecosystem. As part of the 5G Victori Project we are facilitating a workshop series to understand complementary value creation throughout the ecosystem, the distribution of stakeholders and roles in different deployment environments (e.g. railways and smart cities), and potentials to enhance ecological, social and economic value creation e.g. considering sustainable business model design patterns such as pay-for-success or green freemium.   One essential challenge here is to find viable paths to deal with the complexity of different business model components or activities, different types of (economic, social and ecological) value creation, and different stakeholders including ecosystem partners being involved, without running into an overwhelming complexity. We are developing a methodology that integrates sustainability orientation consistently in each of the steps and that ensures that sustainable value creation is baked in ecosystem development from the outset. Useful resources are already available, including the EU Taxonomy of sustainable business activities, our own taxonomy of business model design patterns accounting for economic, social and ecological value creation, and practically proven tools to model sustainable business, and a generic process model developed and applied for 5G vertical business ideas in the 5G Victori project.

In this brief article on "Values-based innovation using design patterns for sustainable business model design" for ServiceToday (the magazine of the German service association) we link values-based innovation management with sustainable business model design. How can we ensure that new products and services not only create added value by meeting short-term needs, but are also aligned with what different stakeholders such as company employees, customers, suppliers and societal stakeholders value in the medium and long term?