Innovations and Sustainability
Sustainability has become a grave concern for humanity in general and for countries of emerging markets in particular, such as China and India, due to their sheer size and market growth potential. These countries are in dire need to transform their economies to ones of higher value added and more environmental friendliness as they are now experiencing pollution of air and water, depletion of natural resources, labor unrest, and other consequences of rapid industrialization and of having been the world's low-cost manufacturing base. To say that sustainability requires innovations in product, process and value chain is to state the obvious, but this is exactly where operations management can have a great impact. The goal of this POM special issue is to stimulate research in operations and value chain innovations that help to advance sustainability for providing both environmental and societal benefits and superior product performance for a profit.
We ask:
• How can cultural, geographical and organizational barriers affect the advancement of sustainability? What types of value chain innovations may circumvent these barriers?
• China is viewed by many as the "factory of the world". What is China doing in sustainability? How effectively?
• How to identify and evaluate new promising green technologies against the backdrop of particular economic and business contexts?
• How can value chain design be paired with new technologies to achieve commercial viability for new or existing green products?
• How to use byproducts of the main manufacturing process to minimize long-last impact on the environment?
• Can we innovate in product, process and value chain to induce sustainability? Can we innovate in operations in a particular business context so that sustainability-friendly practice becomes a natural outcome?
• How to innovate the value chain to minimize the negative externalities that multiple players impose on one another? What guidelines can be developed to facilitate sustainability in value chain design?
You are invited to submit papers concerning these and other related critical issues in environmental and sustainability challenges. This POM special issue aims to sharpen the focus on, and raise the awareness of, these critical issues, especially those facing developing economies like China and India, and to promote research, both theoretical and empirical, on specific sustainability related problems and innovative practices to address these problems.
All submissions must adhere to the format, style and other established guidelines for regular POM submissions. Manuscripts must be submitted by November 30, 2017. Authors will be strongly encouraged to revise and resubmit their papers within four months after the first review cycle. Acceptance decision will be made within three review cycles. Authors should note that in submitting a manuscript to be reviewed for this special issue, they may be invited to serve as potential reviewers for other manuscripts.
Please submit online at https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/poms. Questions on this special issue can be sent to Hau Lee (haulee@stanford.edu) or Hongtao Zhang (imhzhang@ust.hk).
