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participatory way (Dahlander and Wallin, 2020) but many of them studied it from the perspective of profit maximization and such. However, few of them tackled societal challenges by asking questions such as how open innovation might accelerate the coordination of business and other activities in the face of societal challenges (McGahan, Bogers, Chesbrough, and Holgersson, 2021). The authors mentioned Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the initiative of Open Covid Pledge firms that started to offer free licenses to their IP for the purpose of fighting the pandemic. These issues had an impact on me and triggered me to think about “how can I define my position as an academic and an educator?”, “was there anything I took for granted?” and “what would I do differently?” It is not easy to answer these questions. As a person who was writing a PhD thesis about open innovation in relation to product development, I realized that I focused on business outcomes in relation to productivity etc. The reason for this is mostly the epistemological community I was working with. At some point, as mentioned above, I started to think outside of the mainstream strategic management research, then I decided to become an academic questioning the underlying mechanisms rather than asking the same questions over and over again and publishing accordingly. I also started to gain some degree of self-awareness and decided to be an educator who includes critical thinking and ethical understanding in the courses I might be responsible for in the future. In line with this, I realized that I took innovation theory for granted and did not change the way it is represented in the literature. I am not stating that we should drop all the heavy concepts in relation to innovation. It is quite the contrary. The concepts are a big part of the course topic. For any lecturer who teaches innovation, it is necessary to go deeper in these concepts. Yet, as aforementioned by Hutter et al. (2015), innovation should be considered including what social actors do with regards to knowledge, discourses, actions, social systems, and institutions. My lecture lacked this understanding, so I taught some kind of “a typical innovation course”. For instance, I asked students to think of themselves as “a prospective company/innovation manager” Later on, I thought that while it was a pragmatic approach, it lacked a broader perspective. As the process of curriculum design for the program was very well structured beforehand because it was a part of the EU project, there was some flexibility to construct the course content. However, it would be true saying that the well-structured nature of the program put me in some kind of comfort zone. It is important to state that “we are likely squarely in our comfort zone as organizational scholars, but we need to roll up our sleeves” (Howard-Grenville, 2021, 256). If it is for now, I would have done it differently. For instance, I would argue whether technological advantage is the only way to make excessive profit, every profit made means creation of new value and new value is produced by technological innovation. In doing so, I would suggest different resources for the course and give different assignments that challenge students to think beyond the current framework. The experiences of lecturer 2: concepts of leadership
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