Social - Ecological Innovation

Social-Ecological Innovation (SEI) results from strategic integration of sustainable innovation and innovation for sustainability (Edgeman & Eskildsen 2012a). Sustainable Innovation results when innovation contributes to the financial security of the organization; is regular, systematic, and systemic to its endeavors, and is thus embedded in enterprise culture. Innovation for Sustainability addresses ecological or societal considerations so that it is generally a subset of the enterprise innovation portfolio. SEI is critical to organizations intent on the asymptotic goal of becoming a continuously relevant and responsible organization (CR2O) through transformation of the 3E (equity, ecology, economy) strategy of the Triple Top Line (McDonough & Braungart, 2002a) into 3P (people, planet, profit) results associated with the Triple Bottom Line (Elkington, 1997). This is congruent with the cradle-to-cradle philosophy of product and service design, delivery, and lifecycle (McDonough & Braungart, 2002b) and with the status of sustainability as a key driver of innovation (Nidumolu, Prahalad, & Rangaswami, 2009). From a SEI perspective, innovation is relevant to the organization, society, and the natural environment. Similarly, the organization is both relevant and responsibility with respect to society and the natural environment. Positive correlation of SEI with enterprise value (Al-Najjar & Anfimiadou 2012), affirms the profitability of SEI. More pervasively, SEI extending throughout an enterprise ecosystem contributes to socioecological resilience (Olsson & Galaz, 2011) with large-scale deployment possible through a modified form of quality function deployment (Edgeman & Hensler, 2005). While SEI is defined, it must also be proliferated and assessed and any serious assessment requires not only an understanding of what SEI is, but also of how and in what forms it manifests, how developed or mature it is, and how to improve future SEI strategy and results. SEI is herein elaborated, maturity scale assessment for SEI is described, and a simple assessment report that combines graphic and narrative feedback is presented. The assessment report is referred to as a SEI News Report and provides feedback to the organization concerning its present SEI performance, while also delivering significant foresight that will inform future SEI efforts, advance Sustainable Enterprise Excellence (SEE) performance, and aid progress toward becoming a CR2O. As such, the enabling role of SEI in SEE is also briefly addressed.