Dear colleagues,
We hope you will join us for the next virtual meeting of the Innovating for Sustainability Salon on October 1, 10:30 am – 12:00 pm Eastern Time. The theme will be: From Local to Global: The study of sustainable innovation at various systems levels. The theme description is below our signature.
About the Salon. By RSVP'ing for this meeting, you are also joining the Innovating for Sustainability Salon – a global community of 100+ researchers in the sustainability and innovation space. The community meets regularly (about every 3 months) to share research. This Salon is intended to provide an alternative to face-to-face meetings, which are cost, time and carbon intensive. If you join this community, we ask that you make every effort to attend the meetings regularly.
To join this community and RSVP for the Oct 1 meeting, please complete the short form at Salon website. Every meeting is animated by three presentations of work-in-progress followed by dialogue, using the Zoom platform.
Please contact Chelsea Hicks-Webster (chicks@ivey.ca) with any questions.
Collaboratively yours,
Tima Bansal (Ivey Business School)
Marie-France Turcotte (Université du Québec à Montréal)
Joel Gehman (Alberta School of Business)
Garima Sharma (Anderson School of Management)
Sylvia Grewatsch (Goodman School of Business)
Angela Greco (University of Groningen)
Theme: From Local to Global:
The study of sustainable innovation at various systems levels. Solutions to grand challenges are being addressed at different levels in the system. Increasingly, many sustainability approaches advocate the implementation of local solutions to tackle global challenges. This approach presents both advantages and limitations. For instance, district levels are seen as critical to effectively innovate small-scale infrastructures for renewable energy upgrades –e.g. mini-grids and 'local energy communities', enabling neighbourhood sustainable grid configurations. However, for policies such as those intervening on climate change, this approach might compromise their effectiveness, since they address environmental damages extending beyond local jurisdictions (Bushnell, Peterman & Wolfram, 2008). The systems nature of grand challenges calls for systems solutions. While a local approach to grand challenges comes with limitations, a holistic approach to sustainable innovation presents many challenges. The next salon seeks to explore the study of sustainability innovation at different levels in the system.
Questions of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:
- How are sustainable solutions being managed at different systems levels?
- How can problem-centric innovation organically spread across multiple levels?
- What types of innovations can address sustainability challenges in a holistic way?
- What is the impact of local solutions to global problems?
- How can local approaches balance long-term sustainability goals with short-term solutions?
- What are specific types of grand challenges that need to be tackled at the local level as opposed to the global level? How can short-term local solutions be agile enough to accommodate long-term and large scale sustainability demands?
- How can resilient systems be built without compromising the flexibility needed to address long-term challenges?
- Can local solutions be responsibly scaled without resulting in unintended consequences?
- How about place-dependency of local solutions?
- Different branches of science are tackling systems problems. What types of cross-disciplinary space can allow management scholars to study the nexus between global and local governance for responsible innovation?
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Pratima Bansal
Ivey Business School, Western U
London ON
(519) 661-3864
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