The themes of technological innovation, entrepreneurship, and organizing
KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS
Case Study: A case study is a research strategy which focuses on understanding the dynamics present within single settings (Eisenhardt, 1989).
Corporate Sustainability: Corporate Sustainability can be defined as meeting the needs of a firm’s direct and indirect stakeholders (such as shareholders, employees, clients, pressure groups, communities etc), without compromising its ability to meet the needs of future stakeholders as well (Dyllick & Hockerts, 2002) - which can be operationalized by the heuristic, multi-criteria triple bottom line perspective aiming at the integration of economic, environmental, and social capital through eco-efficiency and effectiveness, socio-efficiency and effectiveness, and eco justice (Schaltegger & Burritt, 2005).
Low-Income Market: Customers with annual purchasing power parity (PPP) of $1500 or less (Prahalad & Hart, 2002). Notably, there is no generally accepted definition of the exact amount of purchasing power yet and the debate on this specific amount is still ongoing.
Product Innovation: Gualitatively new products which differ significantly from a comparable condition (Hauschildt & Salomo, 2007).
Product-Service System (PSS): A system of products, services, networks of players and supporting infrastructure that continuously strives to be competitive, satisfy customers needs and have a lower environmental impact than traditional business models” (Goedkoop, 1999).
Sustainable Development: A development that meets the needs and aspirations of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs (World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987).
Sustainability-Oriented Innovation (SOI):
A new development (and commercial introduction) of a product, technology, service, process, or business model which, in comparison to a prior version, has a positive net effect on the overall capital stock (economic, environmental, social), whereby tradeoffs between economic capital on the one hand and environmental and social capitals on the other are possible only when the reduction of either one side is compensated with a sufficiently high increase of the other (Hansen et al., 2010; Wagner and Llerena, 2008).
