Aiming for Responsible innovation and Sustainability: looking for new insights from open innovation, circular design, and design thinking with focus on Estonia

Companies are increasingly exhorted to enlarge their vision of innovation to encompass environmental and societal challenges rather than purely financial ones. Thus, firms, especially in smaller economies, like Estonia, look for tools to balance their innovation and economic goals with sustainability requirements. This study aims to answer the research question: How does adopting circular design, design thinking, and open innovation practices enable companies to succeed in responsible innovation contributing to both – firm impact and financial performance?- by adopting new approaches to new product development (NPD) such as circular design for the technical and sensible approach to environmental and societal issues, design thinking to enhance creativity and problem-solving and open innovation to enhance innovation process through collaboration. The cross-pollination of these theoretical perspectives resulted in developing a new conceptual framework for responsible innovation that will support understanding the processes and strategies needed for responsible innovation in organizations and will offer a potential new route to balancing the competing requirements to design new products with the broader considerations of responsible innovation, excel in sustainability performance, as well as derive outstanding financial outcomes. The proposed framework is to be developed based on empirical data analysis collected from over 60 interviews with Estonian companies extended by the interviews conducted in the neighboring countries of Lithuania, Latvia, and Finland. The initial interview findings are to be tested with the use of cross-country quantitative survey data. In addition to the scientific contribution, this project will equip the companies with hands-on managerial guidelines helping to respond to national and global sustainability requirements, competitive pressures, as well as acute need to exercise and exhibit industry leadership in sustainability strategy.