Leveraging the principles of open innovation: an approach towards sustainability in companies

Companies face significant challenges in addressing sustainability. This pressure finds its origin within two sources: market demand, as consumer behaviors change, and regulatory requirements, such as those imposed by the European Union. However, by combining the principles of open innovation with sustainability, companies can not only respond to market and regulatory pressures but also create added value and contribute to the global climate goals. Transparency and traceability are crucial elements in achieving sustainability objectives. Companies can make their positive contributions to climate
protection more visible to consumers by sharing climate-relevant data, such as their carbon footprint. A case study conducted at an Austrian company demonstrated that knowledge transfer from external sources, as well as the exchange of data from within the company, can lead to transparent and traceable
sustainability approaches. Through the case study, it was possible to create a guideline for creating the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) balance, and the identification of savings potentials through reducing GHG emissions towards net-zero pathways. Based on this guideline, barriers were identified with which companies are confronted on their path to net zero emissions. The principles of open innovation are applied to the findings derived from this. Through this application, the terms anchored in the literature such as
Open-Sustainability2, Sustainable- innovations3 Eco-Innovations4
, Green innovations5, Environmental innovations6, Sustainability - oriented innovations7, and Sustainable development innovations8 are to be delineated
and, on the other hand, the concept of Open Sustainability is to be substantiated. In addition, the developed guideline will be significantly expanded with the new findings about the application of the Open Innovation principles in the area of sustainability (see figure 1). The underlying methodology is based on the Design Science Research methodology of Hefner et al. (2004) and Hevner (2007). According to Chesbrough's (2003) principles of open innovation, not all
people qualified for a field usually work within a company, but also elsewhere. The company benefits from using the intellectual property of others, as sustainability can be integrated into its business model or even extended to include sustainability. By combining open innovation with the search for
transparent, traceable, and value-added sustainability, more data and knowledge may be generated. This in turn contributes to the achievement of global climate goals. As a result, at the end of the research, the term Open Sustainability will be expanded in the sense of Open Innovation based on an extent of the original statement from Chesbrough (2003): the use of purposive inflows and outflows of knowledge to accelerate sustainability through open innovation principles and generate value for transparent use of sustainability. 9