Sustainable innovation: In Search for the Value Added Configuration

The concept of sustainable innovation goes beyond realizing technical solutions. For innovation to be effective, knowledge that is developed during the innovating activity requires to be dispersed to assure benefit of the innovation in production, use, maintenance and disposal. Actually doing so might jeopardize an organization’s competitive advantage. Knowledge that has carefully been developed during costly innovation processes becomes available to third parties. The question is however, to what extent should knowledge sharing be realized to ensure that sustainable innovation functions properly on the one hand, and on the other hand not to lose its ownership. Losing ownership might imply that a firm also loses its competitive advantage depending on the nature of the collaboration. Therefore mechanisms for protection of intellectual property are of strategic importance. This creates an innovation paradox, since Intellectual Property Rights do provide incentives to create knowledge, but do not stimulate knowledge diffusion. The seemingly contradiction between carefully building up a knowledge base that secures the market position of an organization striving for sustainability and providing free access to this knowledge is the topic of this article. We discuss knowledge sharing from the dual perspective of realizing sustainability and preserving ownership. It provides a framework for knowledge collaboration with multiple stakeholders and explore various configurations for sustainable knowledge sharing