Browsing by Author "Watson, Rosina"

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    Chapter 16: Teaching sustainability: More than just a game
    (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2024-05-21) Watson, Rosina; Adams, Gemma; Borrelli, Rosina
    Achieving a sustainable future involves rethinking how we live, work, and do business, and understanding the steps people and organisations can take to drive these changes. This involves having a vision of what a just and sustainable future could look like, seeing business as part of an interconnected system, taking bold decisions and collaborating with others. The Exploring Sustainable Futures game is a role-playing learning experience that teaches these skills. Participants experience how the interrelated actions of businesses, government and citizens shape the future, in the context of four possible scenarios of a sustainable future by 2050. We outline how the design and delivery of the game teaches critical competencies for sustainability. We offer practical guidance on playing the game with management students and executive leadership teams. We present emerging evidence on the impact of game play on participants, and recommend more participatory methods for evaluating learning outcomes.
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    Engagement logics: How partners for sustainability-oriented innovation manage differences between organizational logics
    (Wiley, 2024-07-23) Watson, Rosina; Wilson, Hugh N.; Macdonald, Emma K.
    Innovation partnerships frequently experience tensions due to differences in partners' organizational logics. The literature recommends that partners adopt collaborative, empathetic mindsets but even so, tensions can threaten outcomes and partnership continuation. Difficulties can be exacerbated when firms engage stakeholder organizations in sustainability-oriented innovation projects, where each partner is seeking their own combination of social, environmental, and economic objectives. This study explores strategic responses to these differences in logics through eight case studies of sustainability-oriented innovation engagements between a focal business and an external organization. The key finding is that partners can respond to their differing logics by shaping a new “engagement logic” that guides members of both (or all) organizations. A logic frame with four value-related dimensions—value salience, instrumentality, temporality, and language—allows a subtly idiosyncratic engagement logic to be created that is acceptable to both parties. This classification of ingredients of a logic frame forms a wider contribution to the institutional-logics literature. A complementary range of logic practices is identified, covering logic emergence, logic enactment, and boundary defining. The engagement logic aids the partnership by contributing to four partnership-level generative outcomes: partnership commitment, capability integration, scope flexibility, and system orientation. A notable finding is the presence of a logic boundary, specified in work, time, and space, enabling the engagement logic to co-exist with organizational logics; a research direction is whether this boundary also exists in logics at organizational and field levels. The study shows partnerships to be a new context within which novel logics can emerge, contributing to an understanding of how logics evolve.
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    Engaging stakeholders in sustainablilty-orientated innovation.
    (Cranfield University, 2018-10) Watson, Rosina; Wilson, Hugh; Macdonald, Emma K.
    Companies increasingly collaborate with external stakeholders to deliver sustainability- oriented innovations intended to address environmental and social challenges. These partnerships have the potential to combine the diverse resources and capabilities required to implement systemic change, but suffer from conflicts and tensions arising from differences in partners’ objectives driven by their contrasting institutional logics (or ‘value frames’). Through three interconnected studies written as journal articles, this thesis contributes to our understanding of how companies can effectively engage their stakeholders in sustainability-oriented innovation. A systematic literature review integrates evidence from 88 scientific articles into a framework revealing the hierarchy of capabilities required to integrate a company’s stakeholders in sustainability-oriented innovation. Notably, a tier of second-order stakeholder learning capabilities is identified which enables companies to acknowledge, work positively with and learn from differences between themselves and their partners. These differences, as well as the mechanisms and strategies employed to navigate them, are further investigated through eight case studies of sustainability-innovation partnerships. First, findings from a subset of five business-nonprofit partnerships are synthesized into an action-oriented ‘CIMO- logic’ framework which sets out the stakeholder interventions used and the value outcomes generated. Whilst project outcomes are achieved by partners enforcing their own interests through agent control, total value is enhanced when partners recombine their resources and capabilities through resource integration; this process is facilitated by partners navigating differences between their value frames through value empathy. Second, analysis of all eight case studies focuses in on this issue of recognizing and reconciling difference. Five dimensions of difference between partners emerge (goal salience, goal instrumentality, temporal focus, language and collaborative intent) along with five strategies deployed to reconcile tensions arising from these differences (engagement logic alignment, cultural bridging, partner positioning, project scoping and success measurement). Taken together, the thesis’s findings advance our understanding of how companies can effectively integrate stakeholder perspectives into their sustainability-oriented innovation processes. They may have implications for other innovation and partnerships contexts involving stakeholders, including those from diverse institutional settings.
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    A game for all seasons: lessons and learnings from the JRC’s scenario exploration system
    (SAGE, 2020-02-18) Bontoux, Laurent; Sweeney, John A.; Rosa, Aaron B.; Bauer, Alice; Bengtsson, Daniel; Bock, Anne-Katrin; Caspar, Ben; Charter, Martin; Christophilopoulos, Epaminondas; Kupper, Frank; Macharis, Cathy; Matti, Cristian; Matrisciano, Marco; Schuijer, Jantien; Szczepanikova, Alice; Criekinge, Tine van; Watson, Rosina
    The European Commission Joint Research Centre’s (JRC) Scenario Exploration System (SES) is a foresight gaming system developed to facilitate the application of futures thinking to policy-making. It was originally geared at engaging EU policy-makers with scenarios in a facilitated process with a low learning curve. Specifically, the SES was designed to help participants, in less than three hours, to engage in systemic thinking with a long-term perspective and to explore alternative futures on specific issues and themes. When applied in various contexts, the SES proved to have a broader range of applications, which led to communities of practice emerging around the tool. Successful responses to various requests to apply the tool beyond its original focus demonstrated the versatility of the SES. Specifically, we discovered its ability to accommodate a large array of scenarios to discuss a very diverse range of issues. The experience accumulated through several adaptations of the SES allows the analysis of the various strengths and weaknesses of the tool as a platform for futures thinking and sharing more broadly the know-how for the creation and application of new versions. Ultimately, this article seeks to contribute a series of design suggestions for futures practitioners seeking to develop a playful mode of interaction with scenarios, or those seeking to repurpose the original SES system for use in their own project.
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    Harnessing difference: a capability-based framework for stakeholder engagement in environmental innovation
    (Wiley, 2017-06-02) Watson, Rosina; Wilson, Hugh; Smart, Palminder; Macdonald, Emma K.
    Innovation for environmental sustainability requires firms to engage with external stakeholders to access expertise, solve complex problems, and gain social legitimacy. In this open innovation context, stakeholder engagement is construed as a dynamic capability that can harness differences between external stakeholders to augment their respective resource bases. An integrative systematic review of evidence from 88 scientific articles finds that engaging stakeholders in environmental innovation requires three distinct levels of capability: specific operational capabilities; first-order dynamic capabilities to manage the engagement (engagement management capabilities); and second-order dynamic capabilities to make use of contrasting ways of seeing the world to reframe problems, combine competencies in new ways, and co-create innovative solutions (value framing), and to learn from stakeholder engagement activities (systematized learning). These findings enhance understanding of how firms can effectively incorporate stakeholder perspectives for environmental innovation, and provide an organizing framework for further research into open innovation and co-creation more broadly. Wider contributions to the dynamic capabilities literature are to (i) offer a departure point for further research into the relationship between first-order and second-order dynamic capabilities, (ii) suggest that institutional theory can help explain the dynamic capability of value framing, (iii) build on evidence that inter-institutional learning is contingent on not only the similarity but also the differences between organizational value frames, and (iv) suggest that operating capabilities impact the effectiveness of dynamic capabilities, rather than only the other way around, as is usually assumed. A methodological contribution is made through the application of quality assessment criteria scores and intercoder reliability statistics to the selection of articles included in the systematic review.
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    Leading for sustainability
    (Ideas for Leaders, 2023-11-30) Watson, Rosina
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    Policy for sustainable entrepreneurship: a crowdsourced framework
    (2016-11-22) Watson, Rosina; Nielsen, K. R.; Mera, Christine elena; Wilson, Hugh; Macdonald, Emma K.; Reisch, L.; Hemel, Stefan
    Sustainable entrepreneurship—entrepreneurship with social and ecological gains as well as economic ones—has the potential to play a significant role in addressing societal and environmental challenges. However, sustainability and entrepreneurship have hitherto been addressed through separate policy regimes, and it is not clear how policymakers can encourage sustainable entrepreneurship specifically. The authors develop a policy framework for sustainable entrepreneurship, using an open innovation approach with policymakers, business executives, academics, entrepreneurs and other relevant actors, including an online crowdsourcing event with 150 participants. The framework incorporates five policy domains: creating awareness and skills; building networks; funding and investing; measuring impact and performance; and innovating government. The article proposes a modified version of the multi-level perspective (MLP) on how socio-technical transitions occur, since the findings suggest that policy can catalyze the facilitation and aggregation of innovations coming from the niche level, thereby evolving the socio-technical regime, in addition to the role of policy described in earlier work in stabilizing the socio-technical regime. Contributions to entrepreneurship policy literature include the policy domain of measuring impact and performance, as appropriate success measures are non-trivial in a triple bottom line environment, and the potential for open policy innovation in entrepreneurship policy. Contributions to sustainability policy literature include the requirements for support mechanisms and capacity building to empower individuals to contribute as innovators and entrepreneurs and not just consumers. The sustainable entrepreneurship framework can be applied by policymakers to develop context-specific policies: this is illustrated with a worked example of EU policy recommendations. The paper also outlines a method for crowdsourcing policy innovations.
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    Policy for sustainable entrepreneurship: a crowdsourced framework
    (Elsevier, 2022-12-10) Watson, Rosina; Nielsen, Kristian Roed; Wilson, Hugh N.; Macdonald, Emma K.; Mera, Christine; Reisch, Lucia
    Sustainable entrepreneurship can contribute to sustainable development by seeking synergies between social, environmental and economic outcomes, turning market failures into commercial opportunities. However, institutional conditions often act to obstruct sustainable entrepreneurs. While policy is instrumental in shaping conditions for entrepreneurship, how policy can best support sustainable ventures specifically is under-researched. This study uses a novel crowdsourcing approach with multiple actors in the sustainable entrepreneurship ecosystem to explore how policy can create conditions conducive to sustainable entrepreneurship. An emergent multi-level policy framework outlines six mechanisms by which this may be achieved: resource prioritisation, competency building, sustainable market creation, networked sharing, collaborative replication, and impact valuation. These mechanisms enable three interconnected policy objectives: enterprise creation, system transformation, and impact reorientation. The study thereby makes four main contributions to literature on sustainable entrepreneurship and policy. First, it reveals the importance of a ‘meso level’ of policy that supports the sustainable entrepreneurship ecosystem, complementing micro-level supply-side and macro-level demand-side policies. Second, it proposes a policy focus not just on enterprises and how they are grown, but on sustainability-oriented innovations and how they are replicated. Third, it identifies the need for ‘impact re-orientation’ policies that track and optimise entrepreneurs' individual and collective triple-bottom-line impacts. Fourth, the study exemplifies a promising crowdsourcing method of co-creating policy.