The challenges facing businesses to develop and market green innovations are formidable. A wide range of subjects contribute valuable insights on these challenges including sustainable development, climate change, cradle-to-cradle design, corporate responsibility, energy policies and practices.Without effective stakeholder collaboration that involves employees, consumers, suppliers and investors progress is likely to be severely compromised. This course focuses on two areas of collaboration that to date have been largely overlooked despite their importance for green innovation – network collaboration of businesses with the public sector and network collaboration of businesses with consumercitizens. Today the public sector shapes the framework conditions under which many green innovation initiatives unfold through, for example, policies affecting taxation, pricing and procurement. Incentive structures for reducing energy and natural resource consumption are often relatively weak or totally absent. New solutions that require changes in functionality may become more expensive and, as a consequence, it is important to unleash the creative potential of consumercitizens by involving them in the design and implementation of new solutions. Consumer citizens are already contributing to the innovation of products and services for global corporations and their experiences from these ventures are valuable for other green innovation initiatives.

Choosing a bottom-up network perspective on green innovation can mean that firms avoid situations in which they invent solutions that consumers will refuse to buy. In addition, such network initiatives can help public regulators to craft policies that facilitate the development of effective solutions for both businesses and consumer citizens. This course will draw on recent business cases to investigate the drivers and barriers for network approaches involving businesses and the public sector and also businesses and consumer citizens.
 

The academic world has only recently begun to study how green innovation can be implemented based on a bottom-up network perspective. Therefore, the course will have to borrow theories from a number of other disciplines, e.g., organization, social identity and culture; innovation; relationship marketing; stakeholder management; etc.
 

Key topics include:

• The role of business in green innovation
• The role of the public sector in green innovation
• The role of the consumer citizen in green innovation
• The sustainability of green innovation
• Green innovation and cradle-to-cradle design
• Consumer citizen culture and psychology as a basis for green innovation
• Offline networkand communitybuilding for green innovation
• Online networkand communitybuilding for green innovation

The course's development of personal competences:

The course aims to provide students with an opportunity to gain insights about green innovation and the role of consumer citizens in order to develop their comprehension of ethical aspects of consumer behavior, consumer culture and communities. These aspects include a more detailed understanding of how firms use, rely on, and manipulate ethical marketing communication through the use of communicative tactics, including labeling as in the case of Fair Trade, Organic and Sustainability labels.

The literature covers three key subject areas – innovation, project management/team collaboration and consumer citizen involvement.

Rau, A., Toker, R. and Howard, J. (2010), “Can technology really save us from climate change?” Harvard Business Review, January/February, pp. 21-23.

Nidumolu, R., Prahalad, C.K. and Rangaswami, M.R. (2009), “Why sustainability is now the key driver of innovation,” Harvard Business Review, Vol. 87, No. 9, pp. 57-64.

Johnson, M. W. and Suskewicz, J. (2009), “How to jump start the cleantech economy,” Harvard Business Review, November, pp. 52-60.

Bonabeau, E., Bodick, N. and Armstrong, R.W. (2008), “A more rational approach to new-product development,” Harvard Business Review, Vol. 86, No. 3, pp. 96-102.

Fűller, Johann (2010), “Refining virtual co-creation from a consumer perspective,” California Management Review, Vol. 52, No. 2, pp. 98-122.

Henke, Jr., J.W. and Zhang, C. (2009), “Increasing supplier-driven innovation,” MIT Sloan Management Review, Vol. 51, No. 2, pp. 41-46.

Simanis, E. and Hart, S. (2009), “Innovation from the inside out,” MIT Sloan Management Review, Summer, pp. 77-86.

Hagel III, J. and Brown, J.S. (2008), “Creation nets: Harnessing the potential of open innovation,“ Journal of Service Science, Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 27-40.

Huston, L. and Sakkab, N. (2006), “Connect and develop: Inside Procter & Gamble’s new model for innovation,” Harvard Business Review, Vol. 84, No. 3, pp. 58-66.

Ambec, S. and Lanoie, P. (2008), “Does it pay to be green? A systematic overview,”Academy of Management Perspectives, Vol. 22, No. 4, pp. 45-62.

Bengtsson F. and Agerfalk, P.J. (2011), “Information technology as a change actant in sustainability innovation: Insights from Uppsala,” The Journal of Strategic Information Systems, In Press (corrected proof available online).

Chen, A., Boudreau, M. and Watson, R. (2008), "Information systems and ecological sustainability," Journal of Systems and Information Technology, Vol. 10, pp. 186-201.

Hart, S.L. (1997). “Beyond greening: Strategies for a sustainable world,” Harvard Business Review, January/February, pp. 66-76.

Marshall, R.S. and Brown, D. (2003), "The strategy of sustainability: A systems perspective on environmental initiatives." California Management Review, Vol. 46, No. 1, pp. 101-126.

Melville, N. (2010), “Information systems innovation for environmental sustainability,” Management Information Systems Quarterly, Vol. 34, No. 1, pp. 1-2.

Ozaki, R. (2011), “Adopting sustainable innovation: What makes consumers sign up to green electricity? Business Strategy and the Environment, Vol. 20, pp.1–17.

Parker, B., Segev, S. and Pinto, J. (2010), “What it means to go green: Consumer perceptions of green brands and dimensions and "greenness," American Academy of Advertising Conference Proceedings, pp. 99-111.

Bagozzi, R.P. and Lee, K.H. (1999), “Consumer resistance to, and acceptance of, innovations,” Advances in Consumer Research, Vol. 26, pp. 218-225.

Braungart, M., McDonough, W. and Bollinger, A. (2007). “Cradle-to-cradle design: Creating healthy emissions – a strategy for eco-effective product and system design,” Journal of Cleaner Production, Vol.15, pp.1337-1348.

Denegri-Knott, J. (2006), “Consumers behaving badly: Deviation or innovation?” Journal of Consumer Behaviour, Vol. 5, pp.82-94.

Janssen, K.L. and Dankbaar, B. (2008), “Proactive involvement of consumers in innovation,” International Journal of Innovation Management, Vol. 12, No. 3, pp. 511–541.

Jansson, J., Marell, A. and Nordlund, A. (2010), “Green consumer behavior: Determinants of curtailment and eco-innovation adoption,” Journal of Consumer Marketing, Vol. 2, No. 4, pp. 358–370.

Rokka, J. and Moisander, J. (2009). “Environmental dialogue in online communities: Negotiating ecological citizenship among global travellers,” International Journal of Consumer Studies, Vol. 33, pp. 199–205.

Schröder, A. and Hölzle, K. (2010), “Virtual communities for innovation: Influence factors and impact on company innovation,” Creativity and Innovation Management, Vol. 19, No, 3, pp. 257-268.

Ebner,W., Leimeister, J.M. and Krcmar, H. (2009), “Community engineering for innovations: The ideas competition as a method to nurture a virtual community for innovations,” R&D Management, Vol. 39, No. 4, pp. 342-356.

Kozinets, R.V., Hemetsberger, A. and Schau, H.J. (2008), “The wisdom of consumer crowds: Collective innovation in the age of networked marketing,” Journal of Macromarketing, Vol. 28, pp. 339-354.

Franke, N. & Shah, S. (2003), “How communities support innovative activities: An exploration of assistance and sharing among end-users,” Research Policy, Vol. 32, No. 1, pp. 157-179.

Fűller, J. (2010), “Refining virtual co-creation from a consumer perspective,” California Management Review, Vol. 52, No. 2, pp. 98-122.