MBSIV: A Framework for Creating a Sustainable Innovation Culture

Innovation has been consistently found to be the most important characteristic associated with organisational and market success. Some companies are brilliant at innovation while others, for all their efforts, cannot sustainably deliver successful innovations. Why do some firms succeed while others fail? This paper proposes that sustainable innovation occurs when leaders and managers are able to break open their innovation search space by emphasising need pull innovations and harnessing the innovation energy of user- and customer-innovators; develop the strategic dynamic capabilities of values-based innovation culture and management system; and transition their management systems to “Managing by Sustainable Innovation Values” culture (MBSIV). With its three essential axes (economic-pragmatic, ethical-social, and emotional-developmental), MBSIV allows management to develop a values-based, high-involvement, performance-oriented innovation culture, which becomes a distinctive competency for the firm for delivering innovatory and competitive advantage.

As the Greek philosopher Heraclitus once said, “The only thing constant is change.” Not only is change central to the universe, it is a central component in all human, organisational, and societal development: the child grows into the adult; the organisation strategically adapts in response to the influence of environmental forces; or, as a society shifts from a nomadic band of primitive hunter-gatherers to an egalitarian society, it becomes more complex and centralised, demanding more technology, innovation, governmental regulation, and leadership¹ . Change, too, is a vital aspect of science, which further associates the notion of change with energy. According to physics, energy is a property of all objects and is transferable among them via fundamental interactions. Energy can be converted, changed, into different forms, but it cannot be created or destroyed. Energy, too, may be lost, unavailable for work, which in turn is measured by entropy – normally viewed as a measure of the system’s disorder.ⁱ

Organisations, too, can be associated with notions of change and energy. Change serves as a catalyst for the successes and failures of 21 century organisations and societies that must withstand and even flourish in the midst of the risks associated with numerous economic, environmental, geopolitical, societal, political, and technological transformations: un- and underemployment; the flair up of interstate conflicts; terrorism; the energy, fiscal, and water crises; profound social instability; large-scale voluntary migration; and critical information infrastructure breakdown . Furthermore, the energy and vitality of individuals and organisations have been found to depend on the quality of the connections among people in the organisation and between organisational members and people outside the firm with whom they do business . Research shows that organisational leaders can “spark” a . Purpose is intimately connected to the values of both the organisations and its leaders and may be engendered by the use of values-driven leadership and management systems . Entropy, too, may occur in organisations when self-organising living systems are ignored or when their strategies and cultures are not based on wholeness, interdependent relationships, open communication, shared information, shared values, and trust .