Cancan Wang has recently been funded with a new project titled ‘The Sustainability Sandbox’ (SuS) through ITU discovery grant. SuS is a gamified representation of real-life sustainability projects, used to simulate and visualize the roles and needs of participants in addressing a specific sustainability problem. SuS is an action research project that aims to investigate about how sustainability data governance is experienced by actors positioned differently in a local business ecosystem through a game design process.
The project addresses two challenges that were revealed in Cancan’s previous projects on sustainability data practices around SMEs:
- Small business owners are more likely to pursue sustainability when they see peers and stakeholders move this way and gain from it. This suggests that ecosystem actors like clusters or incubators may be better positioned than individual SMEs to organize their sustainability efforts, though the exact role of ecosystem actors and the coordination model with SME’s in organizing SMEs’ sustainability, is not clear.
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SMEs do not have the time or resources to gather large amounts of data to gain sustainability insights, leaving open the question of whether and how data, as a governance instrument, could be used by ecosystem actors for steering collective actions on sustainabilty transition.
The project builds on two assumptions around how to engage with challenges, which they hope to gain more insights about:
- By simulating the full “value chain” of a complex sustainability issue – including the roles of actors and stakeholders – the game motivates participants, helps them see what needs to be done, and how the efforts of many actors interact to produce a result. By taking on different roles during the game, participants gain insights that are otherwise invisible from a single organizational perspective. In this way, SuS addresses challenge 1 above.
- The visibility of SME and stakeholder needs created by the game clarifies what data should be collected and by whom. This helps address challenge 2 by narrowing a broad and unclear sustainability data collection process to a smaller, well-defined set of data directly linked to specific sustainability goals.
For project related inquiries please reach out to Cancan Wang (cawa@itu.dk)