Sustainability Impact Validation in the Early Stage of Digital Service Innovation : A Case Study of Digital Mobility Startup

Sammanfattning: The current business world and customer buying behaviour are strongly considering the environmental, social and economic impact. Several countries have come forward with sustainability visions and policies across all sectors which makes sustainability a mandatory requirement for all organizations including startups. Digital innovations and digitalization contribute towards sustainable development across all industrial sectors. Sustainability is included as a key element in vision, mission and strategies for both digital and non-digital companies. Sustainability is relatively long term and there are various external factors and uncertainties on which sustainability is dependent. These uncertainties make early-stage digital startups and innovators think about high chances of failures. Lean and agile methodologies are adopted by startups to cope up with these uncertainties and challenges. Sustainability measurement in organizations and specific cases are widely researched nowadays but we found that research on validating sustainability impact in the early stage of digital innovation is still lacking. Hence this paper leads to doing research on digital mobility startups and the process of sustainability impact validation during their early stage of the innovation process. The research paper derives the answer to the research question “How to identify and validate sustainability potential impacts of digital mobility in the early stages of the innovation process”. A single case study method is adopted for the research. Digital mobility startups in Sweden are considered for the case study. Semi-structured interviews were the main contributors to primary data and later it was qualitatively analysed. Findings were derived from the interviews which detail the adaption of the lean innovation process, sustainability-related problems that contributed towards the ideation process, tools and techniques for validating the sustainability impacts and finally the gaps and challenges in sustainability impact validation during an early stage. From empirical findings, it can be stated that identifying and validating sustainability impacts can be attained by discovering the sustainability problem, aligning with the ecosystem actors who have the similar sustainability views and focus, and also by aligning various validation and sustainability metrics indicators during the early stages of innovation.