Author: jmpinkse

Special Issue of Organization & Environment on

“Between Circular Paralysis and Utopia: Organizational Transformations towards the Circular Economy”

We are inviting submissions for a paper development workshop related to a special issue in Organization & Environment on the topic of “Between Circular Paralysis and Utopia: 

Organizational Transformations towards the Circular Economy”. This virtual workshop will allow authors to further develop their paper manuscripts (early stage, work in progress) based on feedback from the special issue editors and other workshop participants. While participation in the workshop is not a requirement for submission to the special issue, it is highly recommended. 

Date of the workshop

The virtual paper development workshop will take place on 9^th May, between 9:00 AM and 5:00 PM CET, and will be organised using an online platform (details will be sent to invited participants).

Submission requirements and procedure 

Only submissions meeting the following criteria will be considered for the workshop:

• Manuscripts must be within the scope of the call for papers. Please read the full call for papers in advance. You can find the link at the end of this document.
• A minimum of 3,000 words is required (‘short paper’).
• The manuscript must contain these (or similar) elements: 
  • Introduction/purpose of the paper
  • Clear identification of the research gap
  • Theoretical background
  • Method of analysis
  • Main (preliminary) findings and contributions to the circular economy discourse in Organization & Environment and beyond

All workshop submissions will be reviewed in advance. Based on the outcome of this review process, participants will be invited by the guest editorial team and receive further details about the workshop.

The deadline for workshop submissions is 17^th April 2023. Notifications about acceptance will be sent until 28^th April 2023.

Submissions must be sent via e-mail to: jonatan.pinkse@manchester.ac.uk

Full call for papers: 

Companies need to think about both positive and negative consumer perceptions when launching greener products, says Jonatan Pinkse.

The fact that global sales of electric vehicles (EVs) have risen sharply over the past year is a good example of how consumers are becoming ever keener to buy green products.

But despite this rise the share of EVs in the market still has a long way to go to catch up with traditional combustion engine models, with many consumers yet to be convinced by the merits of EVs. To some the vehicles are still viewed as too expensive, to others there remain concerns that they won’t be able to travel longer distances because national charging infrastructures are not sufficiently developed.

The EV market is therefore a good example of just how difficult it can still be to sell green products to sceptical consumers, partly because people still need to change their behaviour when they want to use green products.

This then begs wider questions. How can you package green products in a way that really makes them attractive to customers? And how do you market products when they might not be delivering exactly the same thing as existing products?

Sustainable innovation

Sustainable innovations, such as EVs, can be viewed as disruptive innovations. Namely an innovation that reinvents a product by introducing new features as a new source of competitive advantage. Yet disruptive innovations initially tend to underperform on product features which are considered key features of mainstream, traditional products.

This creates a problem because improving a product’s technology can be very time consuming and uncertain. Yes, over time through R&D you can improve a product, but that can sometimes take decades. The issue here is that with sustainability and climate change goals we simply don’t have the luxury of time. We need to make change happen much faster.

The answer to this considerable challenge is for companies to change products in a way that they don’t rely completely on technological innovation, but as much through changing their business model. In short, they have to reframe their value proposition to address the problem of underperformance. How do you change a product so it is still very attractive to the customer, even though you know it might not be quite as good as what consumers enjoy already?

In other words, companies need to not just think about how great their product is, but also how people might consider it not so great and how you are going to deal with that.

Blue ocean thinking

As a new innovator, a key strategy for an incomer is to move into a gap in the sector which the market leader is not addressing, but which customers will value. Indeed when companies have a sustainable innovation they do have a certain freedom to move into new directions and can find that there can be unexpected users of their products.

Employing such a ‘blue ocean’ strategy is where there is probably most potential for sustainable innovation. In other words where innovation is not necessarily always a replacement, but instead a new way of conveying an experience to consumers.

So instead of consumers seeing your sustainable solution as ‘not as good as what I’m used to’, they will instead see it as something new, refreshing and bold that is really capable of changing behaviour.

To adopt a successful blue ocean strategy it is, however, essential that companies find ways of talking to people outside of their own organisations. They have to engage with people who might not really understand what they are trying to do.

Strategies

So when companies come up with a sustainable innovation they have to think about all these different strategies because consumers won’t necessarily buy a product just because it is greener.

Going back to the EV market, Tesla is an example of a company that has delivered an excellent strategy in this regard. What was clever was that the company didn’t just set out to create a vehicle that had great green credentials. It also set out to create a vehicle that still had a ‘wow factor’ – i.e. fast acceleration and great design – and was therefore considered just as good as any premium car.

The result is that virtually every major car player across the world is now scrambling for their share of the EV market in the wake of Tesla’s success.

This blog is based on a recent lecture Professor Pinkse gave at a Spark summit hosted by Bruntwood Works. Jonatan’s lecture appears at two hours 30 minutes on the film. You can also read about his work on value propositions for disruptive technologies.

Republished from: AMBS Original Thinkers

Special Issue of Organization & Environment on “The Organizational Dynamics of Business Models for Sustainability”

We are inviting submissions for a paper development workshop related to a special issue in Organization & Environment on the topic of “The Organizational Dynamics of Business Models for Sustainability”. This virtual workshop will allow authors to further develop their paper manuscripts (early stage, work in progress) based on feedback from the special issue editors and other workshop participants. While participation in the workshop is not a requirement for submission to the special issue, it is highly recommended. 

Date of the workshop

The virtual paper development workshop will take place on 4^th December, between 8:30 AM and 5:30 PM CET, and will be organised using an online platform (details will be sent to invited participants).

Submission requirements and procedure 

Only submissions meeting the following criteria will be considered for the workshop:

Manuscripts must be within the scope of the call for papers. Please read the full call for papers in advance. You can find the link at the end of this document.

A minimum of 3,000 words is required (‘short paper’).

The manuscript must contain these (or similar) elements: 

Introduction/purpose of the paper

Clear identification of the research gap

Theoretical background

Method of analysis

Main (preliminary) findings and contributions to the BMfS discourse in Organization & Environment and beyond

All workshop submissions will be reviewed in advance. Based on the outcome of this review process, participants will be invited by the guest editorial team and receive further details about the workshop.

The deadline for workshop submissions is 13^th November 2020. Notifications about acceptance will be sent until 27^thNovember 2020.

Submissions must be sent via e-mail to: fluedeke-freund [at] escp.eu 

Background and full CfP

The literature on ‘business models for sustainability’ (BMfS) has proposed how organizations can change their goals and practices to create social, environmental, and economic value for all their stakeholders. While BMfS research has attracted much attention, it has a strong practical orientation, and lacks a clear foundation in organization theory. 

The main objective of this special issue is to invite scholars to draw on insights from organization theory to examine how and under what conditions the development and implementation of BMfS are related to organizational change, and to what effect. 

Our aim is to develop a theoretical foundation for BMfS research by drawing on and contributing to ongoing debates in strategy, organization, and entrepreneurship. We expect scholars to develop theoretical insights that range from micro-level cognitive explanations of organizational behaviour, meso-level stakeholder and ecosystem-related approaches, to macro-level systems perspectives that consider the limits posed by planetary boundaries.

We welcome theoretical and empirical papers that address the following sample of research questions:

What are the cognitive, organizational, and systemic determinants of the development and implementation of BMfS? 

To what extent does the development and implementation of BMfS require organizations to change their strategy? 

What is the kind of organizational and evolutionary process involved in the development and implementation of BMfS? 

To what extent do existing resources and capabilities enable or hinder BMfS implementation? 

How do BMfS lead to new organizational forms? How does the adoption of new organizational forms stimulate the development of BMfS?

How does the development and implementation of BMfS impact socio-ecological systems in which organizations are embedded? 

This special issue of Organization & Environment will be edited by Jonatan Pinkse, Florian Lüdeke-Freund, Oliver Laasch, Yuliya Snihur, and René Bohnsack. Submission deadline for the special issue is April 15, 2021. Prospective authors are invited to submit their draft papers to an online manuscript development workshop (expected date: Fall 2020).

The full version of the Call for Papers can be accessed here:

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1086026620929791

Social media extravaganza

To stay productive these days I try not to spend too much time on social media…I’m failing miserably of course. On Twitter many people are worrying about the Coronavirus (COVID-19), blaming others for not doing enough to flatten the curve, or sharing videos of epic Zoom blunders. LinkedIn is used to praise our lackluster attempts to do online meetings and showcase corporate initiatives that ease some of the pain. On Facebook we fuel our friends with nostalgia, sharing memories of when we could still go outside. It is annoyingly sunny these days in the UK. And TikTok? TikTok shows us how to master new dance routines when in self-isolation. In our family, we are thinking about having a go at the arm-flinging Renegade routine or perhaps the floating feet of the Ride It dance. We might need a long period of quarantine though for this to be successful…we have other talents!

Why won’t you listen to us?

But what has our community of sustainability scholars to add in times of crisis? We’re frustrated. And we vent this frustration on Twitter. Why do people listen now and take bold action while the same is oh so necessary for sustainability and climate change as well? The explanation is quite obvious. The coronavirus affects us now, it impacts people close to us, and it is a matter of life and death. Most sustainability events are more psychologically distant. The impacts will take place sometime into the future, what impacts will look like remains uncertain, and when they are more immediate, they tend to take place far away and affect others, not us. Clearly most of us will disagree with this analysis. People just don’t understand climate change well enough to realize that it’s already being disruptive to our society and environment.

Us and them

Still, many people also see the coronavirus as something that won’t affect them. The young and fit won’t suffer as much is a widely held idea. There are generational and societal fault lines here, pitting the young against the old; the rich against the poor; and the worried ones against those who just want to live their life to the max and party. Yet, these fault lines are not always the same as with climate change. While the young blame the old for causing climate change, the old now worry the young are not taking the coronavirus seriously. A fundamental difference is the much broader basis for support to take bold action on the coronavirus. While decision makers think twice before making any sacrifice to economic growth when they announce climate change measures, with corona they show no hesitation at all. Only in some [unnamed] countries there is still some debate about what is more harmful to the economy, the virus or the measures to stop it from escalating.

Emotions or rational decision making?

Bold measures might simply be an act of rational decision making, not taking action now will only lead to worse outcomes in a few weeks’ time. However, emotions also seem to play a role in the decision-making process. For many leaders the fear of going into the history books as being the ones that failed to issue a lockdown, and do what is necessary, clearly overrides worries about economic growth. But there is also the fear of losing the next elections. With corona, we’ll know soon enough if the measures were adequate. If not, our politicians will be held accountable. With climate change we keep groping in the dark about who we should blame. The media are pulling the wool over our eyes by reporting on so many alternative causes for extreme events, such as the recent fires in Australia and the Amazon and the floods in the UK, that we seem to forgive our politicians more easily.  

Will we rethink our economic system after the corona crisis?

Will the coronavirus change how we think about climate change? I’m not so optimistic. There will be major impacts for specific sectors such as airlines, the market street, and the self-employed. Many businesses won’t survive. This might lead to a dip in carbon emissions but the voids they leave will be filled quite quickly by others. For most other sectors, I’m afraid that it will be a return to business as usual. The economic downturn might well be a reason to park climate change again as an issue we’ll deal with later. The last financial crisis showed us as much. Is it all doom and gloom then? Is there no silver lining? I do hope and expect that some of our new routines will stick. We now know that it is really not that difficult to reduce our business travel. We finally forced ourselves to explore the exciting world of online teaching and meetings. We have invested in the infrastructure and hopefully we will keep using it. Still, I’m not so sure that the coronavirus will turn out being the game changer for climate change that we might be hoping for. If social media shows us one thing then it is that trends are quite short-lived. Climate change now already sounds so 2019… 

Professor Jonatan Pinkse, Executive Director of the Manchester Institute of Innovation Research at Alliance Manchester Business School, The University of Manchester.

This article is written as part of #CoveringClimateNow – a global collaboration of more than 250 news outlets to strengthen coverage of the climate emergency.

What the Stern Report did in 2006 for climate mitigation and the need to reduce carbon emissions, former UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon now tries to do for climate adaptation: Show the numbers! This week, the Global Commission on Adaptation that Ban Ki-moon founded together with Bill Gates and Kristalina Georgieva of the World Bank, published its Adapt Now report, stating that investing $1.8 trillion in climate adaptation now will lead to a total of up to up to $7.1 trillion in net benefits. The message is clear, investing in climate adaptation to better cope with extreme weather and rising sea levels makes economic sense. But why are we not doing it then?

The climate emergency might be grabbing the headlines, lots of confusion remains about terms like mitigation and adaptation and the difference between them. People have always felt uncomfortable to admit the need for adaptation, as it could be seen as no longer trying to push for mitigation and reduce carbon emissions. Still, while the climate policy has long discussed mitigation and adaptation both as necessary responses, the business world has been much slower to acknowledge adaptation as a strategy to tackle climate change.

Adaptation is a confusing concept for business. Often, when managers talk about how they do adaptation, they will explain how they are improving their carbon footprint. But this is mitigation. And when you explain what we mean by adaptation, every manager will tell you that their business is always adapting to changes in the environment, also those related to weather and climate. Food producers, insurance companies, they all monitor weather patterns and analyze how any changes might affect their assets. It is part of business-as-usual.

Our research shows that the business-as-usual mindset could be a mistake. It leads businesses to underestimate the out-of-the-ordinary of climate disruptions and the need to radically change business practices to be resilient when experiencing extreme weather events. Studying oil firm responses to the Carbon Disclosure Project on climate adaptation, we found that oil firms have the tendency to see climate signals as nothing new. They don’t see a need to change their business practices because they feel prepared. Many climate signals are just considered part-and-parcel of operating under extreme conditions such as in the Arctic. We found a similar dynamic when Shell openly responded to critique via a public Webchat on arctic drilling. Shell engineers were convinced that they could handle the extreme conditions and there was no additional risk. Still, in 2015 Shell abandoned its plans to drill in the Arctic, apparently due to the disappointing discovery of oil and gas.

Why do firms underestimate the importance of climate signals and fail to see the need for a radical overhaul of their operations? We found that it has much to do with how they process climate-related information in their business. The people responsible tend to suffer from selective attention. They only notice certain signals related to climate change while ignoring others. Much of what they see as climate change depends on the source of information they consult. The IPPC reports, for example, might raise awareness but they lack the specificity needed for business to understand how climate disruptions them. The selective attention also leads to a focus on current activities only, discarding long-term developments.

What was most surprising, maybe, is that firms with well-developed risk management systems and those that frequently experience extreme weather are more likely to underestimate the need for climate adaptation. Paradoxically, being prepared now might leave them underprepared in the long run. Their risk management systems are typically based on past experiences. But, as with financial markets, past experiences do not form a guarantee for developments in the future. By relying so much on the past, firms might fail to see the need for radical measures to deal with the unexpected. The major problem of climate adaptation is that we don’t yet know what nature will throw at us, there is so much uncertainty. Businesses that seem well-prepared might therefore very well be the ones taken by surprise as well. Even if, deep down, they know radical change is necessary, they act as if current measures are sufficient. A change in mindset seems long overdue.

Over the past few months, I have contributed to several newspapers and magazines on the topics of climate change, sustainability and green mobility.

For the Telegraph, I commented on the most recent report of the Committee on Climate Change (CCC) on how to create a net-zero economy: How UK businesses can be ready for climate change

For the Financial Times, I wrote a piece – Climate change isn’t just a boardroom issue, it’s a market concern – in which I explain why business hesitates to take action on climate change. The insights are based on our article on climate inaction, published in Business & Society.

I made a similar argument in Management Today – The main excuses businesses give for climate change inaction – explaining what the reasons are behind the apparent inaction of business on climate change.

I was featured in a piece for Director magazine, on the Future of business motoring. Here I give my views on the future of green mobility such as electric vehicles.

by Aurélien Acquier, Thibault Daudigeos, and Jonatan Pinkse

The sharing economy encompasses an immense range of actors, including everything from major economic players (e.g., Airbnb and Uber) to local community-based initiatives (e.g., repair cafés or fablabs). With such a variety of players, it is difficult to clearly understand the sharing economy. In response, our article Promises and paradoxes of the sharing economy: An organizing framework, published in Technological Forecasting and Social Change, provides a framework to more easily categorize and analyze the nascent, yet booming sharing economy. Sharing as an economic activity is an age-old practice (bartering and lending). However, the current ‘sharing economy’ has grown exponentially thanks to the power of digital technology. While the term is very à la mode, there is no clear definition of a sharing economy initiative.

Is the sharing economy positive?

The term ‘sharing’ already creates an interesting question as ‘to share’ generally has a positive connotation. Yet, as exemplified by debates concerning Uber and Airbnb, the nature of the ‘sharing economy’ can sometimes be viewed negatively. We highlight that the use of the term ‘sharing’ can create a ‘feel good story’ that overlooks the darker sides of this new economy.

3 concepts to understand the sharing economy

To facilitate further discussion and analysis of the sharing economy, we suggest three concepts: (1) access economy, (2) platform economy, and (3) community-based economy.

The access economy includes initiatives that aim to share underutilized assets. Initiatives in this category tend to have two broad promises: first, to provide cheaper and wider access to services or products without requiring ownership; and second, to promote a sustainable solution for more intensive use of the capital ‘trapped’ in products.

The platform economy encompasses initiatives that focus on decentralized exchanges through digital platforms. In addition to promising broader access and resource optimization, these initiatives include secure exchange systems and promote individual economic opportunities.

The community-based economy includes initiatives built around non-contractual, non-hierarchical or non-monetized forms of exchange for products or services. These initiatives promote inclusiveness and social bonding within the community as a solution to overcome problems with traditional markets and bureaucracies.

We explain that most sharing economy initiatives can be categorized as a mix of two concepts. For example, fablabs and repair cafés would qualify as community-based access initiatives (i.e., they encourage local solidarity while promising wider access to particular equipment and know-how). Access platform initiatives include the likes of Airbnb and Blablacar. Community-based platform initiatives include examples such as Citiz, a national French network of local car-sharing companies.

Key points

• Although the sharing economy is booming because of digital technology, it is still too young to be clearly defined.
• Three concepts (access, platform and community-based economy) can help actors understand and categorize initiatives in the sharing economy.
• Maintaining a broad perspective on the sharing economy can help actors understand both positive and negative aspects of this evolution.

The research has been carried out as a collaboration between Aurélien Acquier (ESCP Europe, Paris, France), Thibault Daudigeos (Grenoble Ecole de Management, Grenoble, France) and Jonatan Pinkse (Alliance Manchester Business School, Manchester, UK).

Links: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0040162517309101?via=ihubhttps://www.researchgate.net/publication/318603405_Promises_and_paradoxes_of_the_sharing_economy_An_organizing_framework