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Sustainability transitions require that sustainable innovations develop and scale-up. Two promising approaches contribute to this purpose. Design thinking (DT) focuses on the creative development of sustainable innovations to achieve desirable, feasible and viable products. Strategic niche management (SNM) addresses how sustainable innovations should be deployed to the market. At first sight, these concepts seem to pursue a complementary mission, yet, academic literature has not explicitly addressed their complementary nature. Therefore, this paper addresses this gap by reviewing, proposing and empirically exploring the merits of SNM and how these can be used in DT through a workshop to increase successful market implementation of sustainable innovations. The study finds that SNM potentially helps the DT design process to (1) change market preconditions for the design, (2) create a protected niche for development, (3) establish a (long term) commercial viability, and (4) create an innovation development plan through definition of a set of testable propositions. The paper concludes that the inclusion of SNM into DT substantially increases the preparedness of an innovation team for a successful market implementation of sustainable innovations and coins the term ‘Design to Market Thinking’ for the integrated use of SNM in DT.

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link. This paper makes the case for analysing the role of Industry 4.0 in mitigating the intertemporal tensions of balancing the short-term and long-term sustainability objectives rife in sustainable manufacturing. It is argued here that Industry 4.0 has the unique potential to unlock juxtaposition of the short and long-term dimensions of sustainable manufacturing without restricting manufacturing organisations growth potential. In this context, successful mitigation of intertemporal tensions relies on understanding the role played by five different mechanisms that manufacturing organisations need to well practice and manage when adopting Industry 4.0-associated technologies. Since this is the first study of its kind, this paper presents a novel conceptual model enhancing the application of mechanisms that may mitigate intertemporal tensions in manufacturing organisations using Industry 4.0. The model also suggests five different research propositions that call for future research agenda to further investigate this topic.

Community action for sustainability is a promising site of socio-technical innovation. Here we test the applicability of co-evolutionary niche theories of innovation diffusion (Strategic Niche Management, SNM) to the context of ‘grassroots innovations’. We present new empirical findings from an international study of 12 community currency niches (such as LETS, time banks, local currencies). These are parallel systems of exchange, designed to operate alongside mainstream money, meeting additional sustainability needs. Our findings confirm SNM predictions that niche-level activity correlates with diffusion success, but we highlight additional or confounding factors, and how niche theories might be adapted to better fit civil-society innovations. In so doing, we develop a model of grassroots innovation niche diffusion which builds on existing work and tailors it to this specific context. The paper concludes with a series of theoretically-informed recommendations for practitioners and policymakers to support the development and potential of grassroots innovations.