Shaping Disruptive Solutions for Sustainable Futures: Zooming in on the Social in Socio-Technical Transformation

Creating sustainable futures is one of the grand challenges of our time and one that requires a suit of disruptive solutions to act in concert towards the shared goal. For too long now, businesses have focused disproportionately on maintaining the status quo through sustaining innovations. Our current technologies, with their interest in existing users’ needs and product-market fit, miss opportunities to disrupt at scale. What is needed are disruptive solutions that tackle the sustainability deficiency. In the Science and Technology Studies field, it is well established that technology and society mutually shape each other. Thus, focusing on collective social needs, businesses can shape technologies such that they become fit for tackling sustainability issues. Today, businesses have opportunities to develop economically viable sustainable solutions. Based on signals from both industry and academia, we believe the time is ripe for disruptive solutions that incorporate social actors as active agents in the sustainability transformation. We propose a conceptual study that addresses the following research question: How might social interactions shape and drive disruptive solution development in businesses? To operationalize our research question, Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation sheds some light into the social aspects of technologies, for instance by focusing on the process rather than the product or service. Additional perspectives are needed to grasp the complex and systemic phenomenon of purposefully crafting disruptive solutions in the digital age, in particular around how technologies can be co-created among social actors with competing interests but united by the drive of solving grand challenges. By combining disruptive innovation theory with social shaping of technology and social construction of technology, we seek to understand how businesses might initiate, craft, and shape disruptive technologies together with social actors rather than just adopt otherwise sustaining innovations.