Incorporating Sustainability into Innovation Methodologies: A qualitative case study on how the climate innovation program 20tretti combines Design Thinking and Systems Thinking to foster sustainability-oriented innovations

Abstract

The impacts of climate change are becoming more and more visible to the society as a whole and consequently, sustainability has increased its importance and relevance. To overcome climate challenges, innovation is a crucial tool. However, many of the existing innovation methodologies are not able to consider sustainability aspects due to their user-centered focus and priority to solve current problems. This thesis aims to investigate how a combination of the holistic systems thinking approach and the well-adopted design thinking philosophy may contribute to more sustainabilityoriented innovations. The climate innovation program 20tretti, initiated by StartupLab, has applied this combined methodology and engaged Norwegian corporates and ambitious startups to collaborate. The objective of the research is to examine how the innovation methodology influences the probability for startups to successfully deliver sustainability-oriented innovation to the market. Moreover, the study is a qualitative case study based on semi-structured interviews with participants in the program. In total, eight interviews have been conducted and form the analysis and conclusion of our thesis. We find that system thinking effectively contributes to identifying and prioritizing climate challenges related to the corporates' operations. The design thinking component is less prominent, as most startups were already quite mature with well-developed prototypes before the participation. Further, we find that corporate-startup collaboration is a powerful platform to boost sustainability-oriented innovations, especially for startups that need to test and validate their solutions in larger volumes.