The Innovation Levers to Sustainability Management: Entrepreneurship, Design and Policy

Abstract

We provide an actionable framework for any organization to achieve sustainability through innovation. We propose three distinct innovation levers; namely Policy, Entrepreneurship, and Design which when judiciously activated and combined, can offer a clear path to sustainability with a strong competitive edge. We start by offering a critique of the current views on the importance of innovation to the sustainability challenge, followed by a prescriptive Enterprise Roadmap to Sustainability on how to leverage the interplay between Intra/Entrepreneurship, design, and policy, focusing on management policy, in order to create an innovation-based sustainable organization. This work is the first to identify three effective levers of innovation and provides a practical methodology on how to leverage them to achieve business sustainability that is also market competitive.