Towards a sustainable innovation framework to assess new Indo-Swiss collaboration scenarios

The world is "becoming flat" (Friedman, 2005), this means that innovations are emerging thanks to the deployment of new open collaborative frameworks and Information and Communication Technologies that enable the development of new products and services. Additionally, there are two key emerging trends changing the business arena: 1) the fast development of economies, such as China and India that besides low cost opportunities also represent new attractive markets counting together with more than 2 billion people and which at the same time are investing to improve their innovation capabilities and 2) the acknowledgement of the latent worldwide need to care not only about economic returns, but also about the social welfare of human beings, in whichever market they live, and the impact that any type of organisation has on the environment to diminish worries such as global warming, energy consumption and waste. Therefore, the goal of this paper is twofold: 1) propose a sustainable innovation framework that integrates four key enablers and 2) explain how this framework was applied in the SWISSMAIN project to assess and compare seven identified scenarios to enable Swiss and Indian firms to collaborate towards new business opportunities considering economic, social and environmental impacts. © 2008 International Federation for Information Processing.