As study in the design of an assembly line for reconditioning items

The problem of balancing an assembly line has been facilitated by a number of analytic methods for which computer programs are available. The majority of such techniques accept only deterministic values as the element times of the operations

When bike sharing business models go bad:Incorporating responsibility into business model innovation

Innovations to business models are particularly promising for tackling societal challenges. However, innovation outcomes can be unpredictable. To minimise negative impacts and enhance the success of business model innovation processes, we argue that socio-ethical issues must be incorporated and managed. Research on responsible innovation, which seeks socially desirable and ethically acceptable innovations via the incorporation of socio-ethical issues, is well developed but has often used a technocentric lens. Consequently, it is unclear how socio-ethical issues interact with business model innovation. We explore how business model innovation interacts with socio-ethical issues and aim to understand the ways responsible innovation can help inform business model innovation processes and outcomes. We do this by exploring platform enabled bike sharing business models in the Netherlands. We construct a theoretical framework considering purpose, process and product dimensions of business model innovation. Our results illustrate how socio-ethical factors can play a key role in the success or failure of business model innovation. We argue that without including socio-ethical factors explicitly within analytical lenses, that key elements may be missed, resulting in an incomplete picture of key business model innovation dynamics. (C) 2021 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Innovating for sustainability through collaborative innovation contests

Innovation contests are increasingly used by businesses as an instrument for open innovation to address sustainability related questions. However, according to the open innovation literature, one of the main pitfalls of this approach can be the mismatch between the solutions proposed by non-experts and the companies’ capabilities to implement such solutions. We introduce the concept of collaborative innovation contests – where companies actively collaborate with non-experts – as a way to address this mismatch. Through participant observations, we analyse the process of a sustainability-oriented collaborative innovation contest guided by design-thinking. Our results indicated that the combination of an open innovation contest and design thinking could, through the creation of constant feedback loops, lead to increased collaboration between the contests participants, the companies proposing a challenge, and other relevant stakeholders. However, our results also highlighted trade-offs between the innovativeness of ideas, the alignment of solutions with firm capabilities and the resources needed for collaborative innovation contests. We conclude that, through the involvement of different stakeholders, their ideas and perspectives, collaborative innovation contests are a useful approach to generate a comprehensive understanding of the sustainability challenges companies face