Sustainable Innovation Postpandemic: Perspectives From the U.S., Canada, Norway, and Thailand

This paper explores perspectives for improved sustainable innovation for the post COVID-19 pandemic era. We conducted online interviews between October and December 2020 with 16 individuals working in social entrepreneurship, tech startups, established companies, and non-profit business support organizations across the US, Canada, Norway, and Thailand. Our findings reveal a shared commitment to four themes related to sustainable innovation post-pandemic: (1) thinking of local problems as global problems, in the same way that innovation technologies and businesses can cause global disruptions; (2) including historically underserved populations in innovation business activities, as it is also important to truly understand how technologies and innovation businesses impact the lives of people experiencing low-socioeconomic status; (3) helping people in remote communities, low- and middle-income countries, and wartorn areas is essential – offering hands-on basic computing training could be an option for helping people gain employment in the digital economy; and (4) having governments lead postpandemic sustainable innovation projects and then invite businesses to participate. In addition, this paper proposes a theoretical framework for fostering innovation in resourceconstrained environments following large-scale disruptions.