Employee-driven innovation (EDI) burgeons as an important mechanism to drive the exploration activities by making the general employees responsible for innovation. However, little is known about the conditions under which EDI is most effective. To get a better understanding of EDI, we examine how Stedin, an established global player within the energy distribution industry based in the Netherlands, involves its general employees in innovation activities. Stedin actively supports EDI through strategic programmes designed to stimulate employee innovation. Our findings highlight that collaboration is a main driver of EDI at Stedin. In the early implementation phases, dynamic, heterogeneous, informal and distant collaborations are essential, while the later phases benefit from more stability and intimacy. The insights from our detailed case study provide actionable guidelines for organising EDI initiatives in practice.

Many Higher Education Institutions utilize living labs to address complex societal challenges and foster innovative and sustainable solutions on campus. Despite the perceived benefits of campus environments for transdisciplinary real-world innovation, living labs often encounter challenges. As such, there is a growing need for more knowledge on facilitating these on-campus initiatives in different development phases. Here, enabling factors for on-campus living labs are investigated and their salience across the living labs’ development process established. First, a systematic literature review was conducted, identifying sixteen enabling factors. The most pertinent ones were stakeholders and networks, coordination on the organizational level, a conducive work culture, co-creation and collaboration, and suitable methods and practices for living labs. Second, all factors’ relevance across living labs’ development phases were assessed through the input of an expert panel. To that end, a mapping exercise was developed, which can in itself serve as a discussion tool for living lab practitioners. The results suggested that the initiation phase relies on leadership, coordination, stakeholder engagement, a conducive work culture, and funding. In contrast, operational phases were enabled by shared understanding, internal management, stakeholder collaboration, methodological appropriateness, and evaluation. Lastly, the dissemination phase hinged on transfer, scaling, evaluation, learning, and bridging stakeholders and contexts. These insights contribute to a better understanding of enabling factors for campus living labs during different phases of development, offering tailored guidance for stakeholders while stressing adaptability to local contexts. Subsequently, campus living labs may be better equipped to effectively generate sustainable solutions for the complex societal questions of this time.

Living labs are becoming increasingly popular as suitable arrangements for cocreation and innovation by bringing multiple stakeholders together to work on (solving) complex societal challenges. University campuses are ideal places for living labs, and many universities use such arrangements for various experiments in relation to sustainable future initiatives. Despite the popularity of the living lab concept, much remains unclear about their ways of operation and their potential to innovate. This study aims to show some of the current challenges of on-campus living labs involved with experiments concerning the energy transition. A total of six different living labs were examined based on semistructured interviews with different stakeholders ranging from researchers to operational staff members. Our results show several internal and external challenges, such as the living lab set-up and multiple operational challenges concerning administration, coordination and governance. More external challenges include the overall embeddedness of living labs within the more traditional organizational structure of the university and the tensions between academic and operational processes. Despite these challenges, we conclude that a university campus is still a fruitful place for living labs to cocreate and innovate. By creating awareness and understanding of the challenges living labs face, future initiatives may be facilitated better so that campus living labs are able to unlock their potential to innovate and contribute to societal challenges sooner rather than later.

Rather than the view of the entrepreneur as a ‘lone ranger’, recent work has focused on the importance of teams in bringing a start-up to growth and success. Here, we aim to bridge the gap between the individual characteristics of entrepreneurs and the characteristics of their teams by examining openness of founders in relation to creative team environment (CTE), innovative work behaviour (IWB) and performance. On the basis of upper echelon theory and integrating other complementary theories such as the attention-based view, we develop a theoretical framework and test this using a survey of 322 high-tech entrepreneurs. Our findings suggest a mediating role of CTE and IWB in the relation between openness of entrepreneurs and performance. The implications of the results for managerial practices and future research directions are discussed.

This chapter introduces the background, aims, contents, and implications of the edited collection “Innovation for Sustainability: Business Transformations Towards a Better World

This study examined how organizational control is related to employees’ organizational trust. We specifically focus on how different forms of control (process, outcome, and normative) relate to employees’ trust in their employing organizations and examine whether such trust in turn relates positively to employee job performance (task performance and organizational citizenship behavior). In addition, and in response to the recommendations of past research, we examined these relationships in a high control and compliance-based cultural context. Using data from 105 employee–supervisor dyads from professional services firms in Singapore, we find support for our hypothesized model. The implications of the results for theory and practice, and directions for future research, are discussed.

Linkage between science, engineering and technology creates and develops an academic program which includes a broad function from basic research to management of products and processes, called Technology and Innovation Management (TIM), with the aim of knowledge creation within innovation networks and subsequently, to advance humanities and develop economy. Nevertheless, given the relatively nascent nature of the TIM field, especially with respect to more established disciplines such as engineering, the occupations available to the individual actors of technical innovation networks remain unknown. As a preliminary step to addressing this gap, we identified individuals in innovation network employed in the Eindhoven province of the Netherlands, and studied what type of activities in their occupational movement they undertook. Further, we studied their linked-in profiles, which in many additional cases provides more useful information of the same type. The study results show an occupational movement typology that contains three types of paths available to the individuals - single, dual, and hybrid - pronounced by technical, managerial, entrepreneurial, consultancy, and academic occupations. The results reveal that more than half of the target sample follow a hybrid occupational movements, underlined primarily by technical activities across their work histories. We conclude our paper with implications for future research.