The green vistas of sustainable innovation in the IT domain

Abstract

Sustainable innovation is about creating social, environmental, and economic value for all stakeholders involved. The sustainable innovation lens offers an extension of the prevailing discourse on Green IT/IS and renders a three-fold approach that encompasses social, environmental and economic dimensions of sustainability. Moreover, sustainable innovation entails a proactive approach that focuses on developing creative solutions to environmental and social challenges rather than merely on reducing the IT footprint by waste management and regulation compliance. Building on a longitudinal analysis of sustainable innovation in the automotive industry, we gained a number of relevant insights that can be applied to the information technology domain. First, our results illustrate that a sustainable innovation approach can serve as a source of creativity and innovation that enables firms to aim for generating bigger wins for businesses, the environment, and society overall. Second, our results suggest that sustainable innovation requires a concerted effort of all stakeholders to reshape existing norms and values, formulate new standards, and reconfigure work systems vis-à-vis the social and environmental vistas of sustainable value. Building on our study, we provide further recommendations for IT research and practice.