Innovation has become a popular buzzword in management. It can simply be defined as the process for re-creating the old and creating the new. It is almost impossible to identify leaders and organization nowadays that do not consider innovation in their strategies. One of the reasons that many of these strategies fail is that managers talk about innovation but do not walk the genuine innovational path. One of the newest innovation strategies for firms, today, is to adopt an open innovation approach. According to Chesbrough (2003), innovation is effective when organizations really open up their innovation process and development of new products and services to external actors such as scientists, suppliers, and customers, while also adapting common tools to integrate end-users in the generation of creative sustainability ideas, concepts and prototypes. The main advantages of these practices are expanding the level and number of new creative ideas, thinking ‘out-of-the-box’, tailoring products to latent needs and wants, and reducing the risks of market failures.
Coaching by Sustainable Innovational Values (hereafter CSIV) is presented as a leadership tool to deal with open innovation environments, which helps leaders, managers, and their organizations face the many management challenges of the 21st century. Given the number of simultaneous transformations and challenges occurring around the world (i.e., the growing global population, an increasing level of migration and mega cities, a constant search for new ways of creating a decent life, the energy crisis, infrastructure collapses, the growing global divide, comprehensive access to education, and the ‘metaverse’ and singularity of virtual reality (Raich and Dolan, 2008), we argue that managers and leaders—and all organizational members, in fact—need to abandon old paradigms and develop new ones for the sake of our survival and the survival of future generations (Raich et al., 2014).
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