EcoPath – Pathway to Sustainability: Design, Implementation and Evaluation of a Participation Platform for Employee-Driven Eco-Innovations

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The growing significance of sustainability in contemporary society is indisputable. In response to the pressing need to address environmental challenges, organizations across both private and public sectors increasingly prioritize sustainable practices and innovations (eco-innovations) to secure a livable future for upcoming generations while fulfilling their corporate social responsibilities. The University of Hamburg (UHH) has demonstrated a strong commitment to sustainability, exemplified by appointing a Chief Sustainability Officer and establishing a dedicated Sustainability Office (SO). However, the university's vast and decentralized structure, encompassing over 40,000 students and 15,000 employees, presents substantial challenges in implementing eco-innovations uniformly across its faculties and departments. Despite these challenges, the university possesses considerable potential to harness its many members' creativity and expertise, including employees and students. By adopting the concept of employee-driven innovation (EDI), the UHH community can play an active role in identifying, developing, and implementing impactful eco-innovations.

EcoPath is a one-year, student-led research initiative conducted in collaboration with the SO at the UHH. The project's primary objective is to develop a participatory platform with an incentive system that promotes EDI, focusing on eco-innovations to enhance sustainability within the university. By empowering employees, and potentially students, to propose and drive eco-innovations, we seek to expand the university's capacity for innovation while supporting its digital transformation. The project aims to address three research questions:

1. How can participatory platforms be designed to promote employee-driven innovation within educational institutions, particularly universities?
2. What incentive methods and factors are most suitable in motivating university employees to actively engage with a participatory platform?
3.  How can such a platform be effectively integrated and communicated within a university to encourage eco-innovations from its workforce?

Our project is structured two-fold. First, we will develop and implement a participatory platform designed to facilitate the submission, documentation, and evaluation of ideas for eco-innovations. Drawing on principles from participatory research and innovation management, this platform will serve as a digital space where UHH employees can actively contribute their ideas. For evaluation, we will conduct workshops to introduce the platform to a pilot group of employees, enabling iterative feedback and ongoing refinement.

Second, we will focus on developing an incentive system to encourage active participation on the platform. Drawing on research in motivation and organizational behavior, we will examine various incentivization strategies and tailor them to the unique context of a public university. This is supported by analyzing the literature and conducting a survey with the UHH and its employees to ensure the system is effective and contextually appropriate.

At a broader level, the EcoPath project seeks to lay the groundwork for fostering employee-driven eco-innovations within educational institutions by creating a functional innovation ecosystem with a participation platform and an accompanying incentive system. The data collected and the insights gained from this initiative will enhance the understanding of how these systems can be successfully implemented in such settings and contribute to future research on designing participatory platforms.

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Studentische Forschungsgruppe:

• Dejan Simic
• Gian-Luca Gücük
• Sarah Lucie Tews

Mentor:innen:

• Prof. Dr. Laura Marie Edinger-Schons
• Prof. Dr. Tilo Böhmann
• Stephan Leible
• Constantin von Brackel-Schmidt