Facilitating Sustainable Innovation through Collaboration

Innovation, sustainability, and collaboration are all related in their efforts to manage multiple dimensions of organizational and institutional policies and practices. This book provides an overview of the three topics and their relative importance to overall advancement of sustainability through innovations. Collaboration is necessary to achieve this goal and various collaborative arrangements and stakeholders in these arrangements are discussed. Considerations of facilitating sustainable innovation through collaboration must start by recognizing that sustainability and innovation are flexible terms and that actors can interpret them in different ways, leading to possible misunderstanding, conflict or misappropriation of terms for vested interests. Since collaboration requires the use of dialogue and reasoned argumentation to foster mutual understanding and this in turns requires trust and transparency in the use of terms. With this in mind, we provide some relevant definitions and contrasts below. The terms  “sustainability” and “innovation” are widely used by social coalitions promoting development. However not everyone committed to sustainable development strives for it in the same way. Apparent consensus on the promotion of sustainability and innovation often masks significant differences on the meaning and implications that actors assign to these words.

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