Sustainable global operations management and frugal innovative sustainable production methods: advancing theory and practice for a truly sustainable society

This editorial aims to introduce the relevance of the special issue and summarize the major contributions of the accepted papers. In addition, it proposes a research framework that could serve as a pointer for future researchers to proceed with further research challenges in the field of global operations management in terms of a need for advancing theory and frugal innovative production methods for achieving a sustainable society

The Belt and Road Initiative for an intercontinental ecosystem: Strategic implications for multinational enterprises around the world

[Extract] International trade and foreign direct investment (FDI), as well as other forms of cross-border economic activities, are essential to globalization, even in the emerging era of neoglobalization as a unique balance between globalization and deglobalization. Despite the hype, globalization is a relatively new phenomenon

Nurturing Business Ecosystems for Growth in a Foreign Market: Incubating, Identifying and Integrating Stakeholders

This paper explores the process of nurturing a business ecosystem to facilitate corporate growth in an unfamiliar foreign market with high product uncertainty and no network resources. The authors conducted a qualitative, longitudinal study by examining a successful business case — ARM (a leader in microprocessor intellectual property) — to demonstrate how firms nurture their business ecosystems to develop in the Chinese market and to stimulate demand even with- out the advantages of resources and stabilized products. Based on the road map method, this paper develops a framework of creating a business ecosystem in three sequential stages namely, incubating complementary partners, identifying leader partners, and integrating ecosystem part- ners. The findings enrich classic international business and demand chain theories by highlighting different roles stakeholders adopt to cope with uncertain products in a foreign market. In practical terms, these findings also provide Mode 2 knowledge with application context (Gibbons et al., 1997) on entering new markets by building up an ecosystem

Sustainability-oriented innovation: a systematic review

types: ArticlePre-print draft of article submitted to International Journal of Management ReviewsIn this article we systematically review the literature relating to Sustainability-Oriented Innovation (SOI), and present a model to help understand different types and phases of SOI in companies. SOI involves making intentional changes to organizational mind-sets and values, as well as the products, processes or practices that produce environmental and/or social benefits in addition to economic value. The model distinguishes between contexts of Operational Optimization, Organizational Transformation, and Systems Building, and is populated with a range of innovation practices illustrating what firms do to become more sustainable. The model is developed from a review of 127 articles from the academic and practitioner literature and focuses on the period between the two Earth Summits (1992-2012). The systematic review forms the foundation of this paper, but we supplement and populate the model with instances of SOI activity drawn from more recent practitioner literature to provide richer insights into contemporary pioneering SOI practice."This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Sustainability-oriented Innovation: A Systematic Review, International Journal of Management Reviews, 2015, which has been published in final form at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ijmr.12068/abstract. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving.

Frugal Innovation for Supply Chain Sustainability in SMEs: Multi-method Research Design

In this study we attempt to establish the missing links between supply chain sustainability and frugal innovation. Our study motivations stem from two facets of the emerging markets: firstly, the institutional barriers and secondly, the resource constraints. We argue that there is a synergy in the concepts of frugal innovation and sustainability in supply chains and there is a need to further explore this synergy. Furthermore, we claim that even in the wake of many success stories in the frugal innovative supply chain management practices from emerging markets such as India, there are very few, if any, attempts made to understand the implications of a sustainability oriented frugal innovations in the particular context. To address this gap we develop a model to establish the linkage between sustainable supply chains and frugal innovations. Our proposed conceptual framework depicts the hierarchy and interlinks of the identified enablers in developing sustainability oriented frugal innovative capabilities in supply chains. Furthermore, we have empirically validated our theoretical framework using survey data. We observed that most of the interpretive links are supported. These findings extend the understanding of frugal innovation for supply chain sustainability using multi-method research design, while also providing theoretically guidance to managers in the development of frugal innovation capability to achieve sustainability in supply chain in resource constrained environment