Using Society 5.0 as Lever for Strategic Innovation: Mitigating grand challenges in local regions

Society 5.0 is attracting attention as a new societal paradigm boasting a human-centric approach to innovation and development. The logic is that many decades of priority on technological innovation and less on social innovation have created grand challenges for societal, social, and ecological perspectives. This paper discusses how a city, a region, or a group of organisations can initiate and elaborate a collaboration built on the premises of Society 5.0, and what would be important for them to consider regarding the collaboration. We utilise inter-organisational and multi-level learning theories as theoretical backgrounds, specifically, the 4i and 5i frameworks. Our discussion adds a new level of learning to the existing literature: ‘extra-organisational learning’ based on a sub-process of ‘inspiring’, implying that Society 5.0 would require a 6i framework to achieve its full value creation potential.