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.

We created and delivered a generic process to create and consolidate sustainable business models for new, technology-based service ideas, for instance involving new 5G telecommunication capabilities. The process describes five overarching steps (see figure below) and is complemented by a number of resources and templates that contain further support and instructions.   1. Collect business-related ideas (e.g. on market gap and technology readiness) using an idea profile template 2. Select sustainable business design patterns to enhance the sustainability-orientation of your idea 3. Facilitate collaborative stakeholder workshop (using the MURAL board template of the Business Innovation Kit) 4. Document, analyse and synthesize results and implications drawing from related literature 5. Plan and enter validation and implementation     The process was developed and exemplified for three 5G telecommunication service ideas, namely Multimodal Mobility Services, vCDN (virtual content delivery network) services for railways, and On Demand Private Network for Industry 4.0 capabilities. See the 5GVictori website for (preliminary) results and further news of the project.

Innovating our Common Future is the motto of the ISPIM 2021 conference in Berlin. With our Special Interest Group (SIG) track of activities (see here for an introduction to the SIG track), we join worldwide leading innovation professionals from research and advanced practice. Together with our colleagues from Borderstep we are hosting this event and contributed Values-Based and Sustainability-Oriented Innovation Management focus theme of the conference. Changing customer and stakeholder values and normative frameworks such as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by the United Nations create new challenges and opportunities for innovation. We call for demonstrations of innovative approaches and solutions for key societal challenges on local, regional and global levels and how these can create our common innovation future. More on our Special Interest Group please find here.

For the Africa Europe Innovation Partnership we are conducting a new training session on Sustainable Business Modelling for CleanTech. During the interactive two hours session, participants will learn to apply sustainable business model design patterns to an innovation challenge or a new business idea in the field of cleantech. Using an online collaboration platform, they generate and prioritise ideas, and learn how to advance the business model in a sustainability-oriented manner. Check the AEIP website for a short handbook and results.

Wall Street Journal Customer Content (WSJCC) interviewed Henning Breuer on values-based innovation and its relations to open innovation. Read the full article here.

As part of the GAMIFY consortium, we co-created two innovation games that are now available online (here a short video). The Corporate Sustainability Innovation Game enables participants to turn sustainability challenges at the workplace into seeds for innovation. The Corporate Sustainability Dilemma game helps to raise awareness for issues of corporate sustainability. Feel free to download and try with your team. UXBerlin is one of the associated partners in the European Knowledge Alliance project GAMIFY.

For almost two years we collaborated with the lab of tomorrow to review, improve and sum up its process in a recently published manual. The manual provides all information needed to conduct an innovation process designed to turn sustainability-oriented business opportunities in developing countries into profitable businesses. It is co-authored by Prof. Dr. Henning Breuer and Kiril Ivanov of UXBerlin, and Prof. Dr. Florian Lüdeke-Freund of the ESCP Berlin. The lab of tomorrow project is implemented by Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit on behalf of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development. Its manual has been developed for both project planners and project implementers. It enables stakeholders to conduct their own lab of tomorrow innovation process: it serves as a step-by-step guide on how development partners can identify promising challenges based on shared values and enable entrepreneurial actors to jointly develop SDG-oriented business models using the lab of tomorrow approach. Thus, local development challenges are matched with tailored business solutions.

At the Africa-Europe Innovation Partnership (AEIP) we hold a webinar on ‘Sustainable Business Modelling for Cleantech’. Participants will learn to apply sustainable business model design patterns to an innovation challenge or a new business idea in the field of cleantech. Using an online collaboration platform they generate and prioritise ideas, how to advance the business model in a sustainability-oriented manner, and sketch and refine new business models.   Prof. Dr. Florian Lüdeke-Freund and Henning will conduct the session to address the following questions: • How to capitalise on the green and social values that motivate and guide green start-ups in delivering sustainable innovations? • How to support and nurture profitable and sustainability-oriented business model innovation in cleantech? • How to improve the sustainability profile of an existing business idea?   The Africa-Europe Innovation Partnership (AEIP) is organizing a virtual event, under the patronage of the South African Ministry for Science, Technology and Innovation, as part of their annual Science Forum. The AEIP is an initiative of the African Union-European Union High Level Policy Dialogue, with funding from the EC, aiming to support and connect innovation and technology incubators, accelerators and technology transfer actors from both continents. It was launched by the Directorate-General for Research and Innovation of the European Commission in September 2019 in Nairobi (Kenya), to strengthen innovation cooperation between Africa and the EU.

What is behind the founders' spirit in Berlin as a hotspot for start-ups? Within the Long-Night-of Science Podcast (German) Thomas Prinzler moderates the discussion with Jonas Liepmann (Founder of Iversity), Prof. Rafaela Kunz (bbw University of Applied Sciences) and Prof. Henning Breuer (University of Applied Sciences for Media, Communication and Management). Prof. Dr. Henning Breuer in the discussion at the Long Night of Science 2020.

Henning discussed some of the common misconcenptions of values and the potentials of a values-based approach to sustainability innovation with colleagues of the insitute for innovation and sustainability. Here you find the presentation slides (with headlines in German).