Corporate sustainability has gone mainstream, and many companies have taken meaningful steps to improve their own environmental performance. But while corporate political actions such as lobbying can have a greater impact on environmental quality, they are ignored in most current sustainability metrics. It is time for these metrics to be expanded to critically assess firms based on the sustainability impacts of their public policy positions. To enable such assessments, firms must become as transparent about their corporate political responsibility (CPR) as their corporate social responsibility (CSR). For their part, rating systems must demand such information from firms and include evaluations of corporate political activity in their assessments of corporate environmental responsibility.
But what is the right way to apply this theory? What are its core elements, and how predictive is it? In this article, authors Andrew A. King and Baljir Baatartogtokh examine these questions. To begin with, they found that the theory's essential validity and generalizability has been seldom tested in the academic literature. The studies that have been published fail to provide confirmatory evidence for the theory. To assess the theory, the authors surveyed and interviewed experts on each of 77 cases discussed in Christensen's two books, The Innovator's Dilemma and The Innovator's Solution (the latter with coauthor Michael E. Raynor). Based on the interviews, the authors found that many of the theory's exemplary cases did not fit its conditions and predictions. A handful corresponded with all of the theory's elements (for instance, the disruptions by salesforce.com, Intuit QuickBooks, and Amazon.com). But the majority were found to include different motivating forces, and some displayed unpredicted outcomes. Among them were cases involving legacy costs, the effect of numerous competitors, and changing economies of scale. The threats faced by the companies in the sample, the authors say, cannot be understood from a single viewpoint or solved by a single prescription. "Instead,"they write, "managers need to evaluate difficult problems from a number of different perspectives. In that spirit, we do not advocate discarding the theory of disruption. Rather, we recommend using its best parts in addition to classical approaches to strategic analysis."Case studies about disruptive innovation "can provide warnings of what may happen,"the authors argue, "but they are no substitute for critical thinking. High-level theories can give managers encouragement, but they are no replacement for careful analysis and difficult choices."
The authors describe a case study of Design Thinking, showing how an organization in Denmark worked through the four stages of the Design Thinking process with help from a local design firm. They describe the four stages in detail - from 'uncovering current realities' to 'prototyping with customers'. Along the way, they show how the employees involved gained confidence in their creative and problem-solving abilities through the process, and that design has a key role to play in achieving creative organizational outcomes.
IBM's "Radical Collaboration" model has been an innovative approach to meeting the challenges of the huge R&D and capital investments that are needed to stay competitive in the global semiconductor industry. This model has required a rethinking of what is proprietary, and what is shared, and where do the boundaries of cooperation end and competition begin. IBM and its partners have managed to stay competitive at, for example, the 45 nm node, at a far lower cost than firms that "go it alone," and there is a large benefit from a larger funnel of ideas and diverse points of view. It also reshapes what firms can use to build competitive advantage, or it necessitates a rethinking at least.