Systematic Review - Network for Business Sustainability

where innovators understand customers (Lettice &
Parekh, 2010), as with the Grameen Village Phone
Project (Singhal et al., 2008).
In Practice
In China, mobile telephone services were
principally targeted toward relatively affluent
individuals living in urban areas. To the
extent that they were served at all, bottomof-the-pyramid
(BOP) customers in rural
areas were sold “out-of-date” phones.
This business model was changed with
the introduction of a new, domestically
developed chip: simpler and cheaper
than other chips, but with limited stability.
Existing manufacturers would not use the
chip because of the stability issue, but it
provided a “good enough” cell phone for
BOP users. A network of users, distributors,
designers and manufacturers united around
the opportunity that this chip offered in a
“network-based value eco-system.” Within
this eco-system, small- and medium-sized
enterprises (SMEs) and local entrepreneurs
worked with BOP groups to design
products that showed an understanding
of local needs and local manufacturing
capability. The cellular phone was
technologically “deskilled,” thereby allowing
local entrepreneurs and SMEs to be involved
and thus building local capability from the
bottom up and providing access to mobile
telephony. Adapted from Zhou et al. (2011).
SUMMARY
In Organizational Transformation, SOI takes on an
increasingly societal and systemic character, which
involves a change in the firm’s underlying motivations.
Innovation goes beyond mere compliance and the
boundaries of the firm’s manufacturing and production
processes into the market, the supply chain and the
wider social and institutional environment: areas where
managers have less control and must take on a wider
systems perspective. Firms are also experimenting with
sustainability at a sub-organizational level.
Firms may appear to be inconsistent: sustainably
oriented in one domain, while business-as-usual in
the other. Indeed, concurrently holding two such
positions has much in common with the notion of the
ambidextrous organization. 17 Ambidexterity emphasizes
the firm’s ability to re-allocate, re-combine and
reconfigure assets, resources and structures in face of
environmental change.
There are also echoes of the skunk works made
famous by Lockheed — in an effort to foster innovation,
organizations split off from the main body to gain
physical and cultural distance from established ways of
doing things.
The best prospects for transition may then be areas
where the firm is able to initiate a “shadow-track”
activity alongside regular business activities (Loorbach
et al., 2010). Incumbent firms may need to develop
capabilities to manage the disruptive implications of
17 The term ambidexterity was coined by Duncan (1976) to describe firms that perform exploratory and exploitative activities one after the other,
not concurrently. The more contemporary view suggests that ambidexterity is the contemporaneous practice of both. Too much structure leads to
rigidity, and too much exploration leads to chaos. Ambidexterity is characterized by the effective balance between the two.
Innovating for Sustainability 54