Values-Based Business Model Innovation: A Toolkit

Abstract

Post-heroic management and research on innovation culture suggest bottom-up strategies to enhance innovation capabilities in organisations. Meanwhile, the open innovation paradigm suggests complementing inside-out activities by outside-in sourcing of ideas, knowledge, and capabilities. Observing an increasing demand for orientation in these activities, we argue that the re-consideration of values—such as ecological sustainability or social justice—may provide the required sense of direction and offer a widely untapped source of innovation. Our framework for values-based innovation management offers a re-foundation of management in general and innovation in particular in that it emphasises the importance of values for normative, strategic, and operational innovation and its management. A methodology and toolkit were developed to realise values-based and sustainability-oriented business model innovation in practice, the so called Business Innovation Kit and Sustainability Innovation Pack. This toolkit builds on a didactic approach that supports self-guided ideation and innovation processes in mixed teams through the definition of values providing a “common ground”, exemplification through cases and business model patterns, ideation for single business model components, and modelling relations across components and models. The methodology underlying this tool supports values-based and thus also sustainability-oriented modelling in collaborative settings. It accounts for the participants’ varying and potentially conflicting values and normative orientations. This chapter describes the concept of values-based innovation, the underlying methodology of values-based and sustainability-oriented business modelling, the toolkit itself, as well as a reflection of practical experience gained with the toolkit.