Melissa Leithwood
Organizational Behaviour, Queen's University
The G-ourmet Spot: Balancing Differentiation and Replication in Sustainable Cuisine

mleithwood@gmail.com

I am a researcher, practitioner, and academic exploring creativity through the convergence of design, entrepreneurship, and sustainable value creation, drawing on examples from within the food industry. Growing up in Toronto, Canada, with Hungarian grandparents who ran a community bakery and spending summers painting the Canadian landscape with my Irish grandfather led me to develop a natural affinity and intuition for exploring the overlap between the fine arts, artisanal foods, and sustainable business. As such, I am currently an active case writer for the Richard Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario and the Coordinator of York University's Institute for Research and Innovation in Sustainability. As well, I am a first year PhD student in Organizational Behaviour at Queen's University where I continue to build upon the research I conducted during my Master in Environmental Studies at York University. Before joining academia, I worked in the luxury lifestyle cosmetics industry for over 7 years in a management capacity at Aveda, conducted marketing research for a Fortune 500 pharmaceutical company, and held a post at RBC Financial Group in the Environmental Risk Management Group as an analyst. Finally, I am active within the community, volunteering as an Editorial Assistant for the Scarborough Arts Council and Co-founding the Toronto Net Impact Professional Chapter, where I act as Co-President to build a network of like-minded sustainability professionals.

The G-ourmet Spot: Balancing Differentiation and Replication in Sustainable Cuisine

The following proposal looks at the balance between differentiation and replication in sustainable cuisine. Staying within the theme of researching how sustainability constraints shape creativity and organizations over time, the proposal aims to build theory based on a series of 6 longitudinal qualitative case studies that look at food preparation and community allegiances based on seasonal and local ingredients within two regional clusters, British Columbia and Ontario. Specifically, qualitative data informs research that analyzes the agentic role of the chef/owner in value-modeling and organizational design embeddedness as points of tension and sources of inspiration in balancing between differentiation and replication; that value-modeling mechanisms, such as training and advocacy, attempt to induce replication but at the same time recognizing that highly embedded organization designs are difficult to replicate authentically as much of the vision and differentiation is wrapped up in the agentics' themselves.