[Research Seminar] “MNE Crowdsourcing Sustainability Innovations”
Speaker: Simone CARMINE
IÉSEG
Date and Location – Friday, April 12nd 2024 from 10:30am to 12pm
in Paris campus (P400) and on Zoom
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ABSTRACT
Sustainability challenges – such as food security – are global in scale yet experienced and responded to locally. Effectively addressing sustainability challenges requires businesses to develop solutions and innovations that are both locally relevant and globally scalable. Among businesses, MNEs are uniquely positioned to innovate for sustainability. MNEs recognize the contribution of locally relevant innovations, but they often struggle to recognize where the most promising solutions lie, and then to integrate them into their innovation trajectory. One way to enable MNEs to recognize locally relevant innovations is crowdsourcing. However, it is difficult for MNEs to crowdsource sustainability innovations due to limited attentional resources and the trade-off between local relevance and global scalability. To investigate this topic, we conducted a qualitative study of Thought for Food (TFF) – a crowdsourcing innovation platform for sustainable food and agriculture. We found that, through crowdsourcing, MNEs find a way to generate multiple new and breakthrough ideas due to specific enabling conditions. However, they struggle to successfully integrate these ideas into their innovation path due to few structural elements that work as barriers. This research contributes to the literature by 1) explaining the contradictory role of crowdsourcing platforms for MNEs to identify locally relevant sustainability innovations and 2) articulating the cross-scale linkages between the local and the global for sustainable development.
