Integrating Systems and Design Thinking in Sustainable Innovation: The Case of the Waste Management Sector

Background Of Sustainability Innovation

Innovation and sustainability are two important contemplations for contemporary businesses and organisations. It is not a case of choosing either but both. Innovation, whether it is about innovating processes, systems, products, services, or business models, presents organisations with an opportunity to improve or reinvent themselves to adjust their existence according to emerging threats or opportunities. Sustainability is an imperative in a world beset with climate change and environmental degradation. Both these phenomena are attributable to a whole range of discordant human activities such as air and water pollution and unsustainable ways of producing goods.

The notion of innovation and sustainability interface along several fronts. Sustainability is considered a way of undertaking business, an innovation in itself as well as a key driver of innovation towards a less environmentally depleted planet (Gobble, 2015; Nidumolu et al., 2009). Innovation is seen as centrally important to achieve sustainability (Hansen & Grosse-dunker, n.d.). Conversely, sustainability has also been considered an important factor in business model innovation and a requirement for innovation broadly (Placet et al., 2015). Both sustainability and innovation have become important attributes companies would like to espouse for themselves for their business competitiveness image (Tunn & Dekoninck, 2016). In a sense, innovation is a factor in sustainability and vice versa. It can be expected that the two concepts will continue to intertwine as organisations and businesses navigate through sustainability as one of the imperatives of this century as the world grapples with climate change and the critical state of environmental depletion visited upon the earth.