Values-Based Business Model Innovation: A Toolkit

Post-heroic management and research on innovation cultureCulture suggest bottom-up strategies to enhance innovation capabilities in organisations. Meanwhile, the open innovation paradigm suggests complementing inside-out activities by outside-in sourcing of ideas, knowledge, and capabilities. Observing an increasing demand for orientation in these activities, we argue that the re-consideration of values—such as ecological sustainability or social justice—may provide the required sense of direction and offer a widely untapped source of innovation. Our framework for values-based innovationValues-based innovation management Innovation management offers a re-foundation of management in general and innovation in particular in that it emphasises the importance of values for normative, strategic, and operational innovation and its management. A methodology and toolkit were developed to realise values-based and sustainability-oriented business model innovation in practice, the so called Business Innovation KitBusiness innovation kit and Sustainability Innovation PackSustainability innovation pack. This toolkit builds on a didactic approach that supports self-guided ideationIdeation and innovation processes in mixed teams through the definition of values providing a “common ground”, exemplification through cases and business model patterns, ideation for single business model componentsBusiness model components, and modelling relations across components and models. The methodology underlying this tool supports Sustainability Sustainable business Values Business models values-based and thus also sustainability-oriented modelling in collaborative settings. It accounts for the participants’ varying and potentially conflicting values and normative orientations. This chapter describes the concept of values-based innovationValues-based innovation, the underlying methodology of values-based and sustainability-oriented business modellingBusiness modelling, the toolkit itself, as well as a reflection of practical experience gained with the toolkit.