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Why and how should scholars, students, and practitioners engage the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to help reframe and refresh how human rights is taught, understood, and lived? This chapter, and indeed all the chapters in this edited volume, answer this question from a variety of perspectives. Binding them together is the belief that business as usual is not working; while international and national legal frameworks are necessary, they are not sufficient for delivering justice, particularly when it comes to addressing socioeconomic gaps. Getting all this right is more than an academic or UN-driven exercise. Closing these gaps is essential to democracies delivering and requires paradigm shifts. In an era of doom and gloom, the good news is that innovations in higher education, another binding theme, can help grow the next generation that will deliver human rights and sustainable development well beyond 2030.

The purpose of this paper is to increase the understanding regarding how managers attempt to make purposeful use of innovation management self-assessments (IMSA) and performance information (PI).

An interpretative perspective on purposeful use is used as an analytical framework, and the paper is based on empirical material from two research projects exploring the use of IMSA and PI in three case companies. Based on the empirical data, consisting of interviews and observations of workshops and project meetings, qualitative content analysis has been conducted.

The findings of this paper indicate that how managers achieve a purposeful use of PI is related to their approach toward how to use the specific PI at hand, and two basic approaches are analytically separated: a rule-based approach and a reflective approach. Consequently, whether or not the right thing is being measured also becomes a question of how the PI is actually being interpreted and used. Thus, the extensive focus on what to measure and how to measure it becomes edgeless unless equal attention is given to how managers are able to use the PI to make knowledgeable decisions regarding what actions to take to achieve the desired changes.

Given the results, it comes with a managerial responsibility to make sure that all managers who are supposed to be engaged in using the PI are given roles in the self-assessments that are aligned with the level of knowledge they possess, or can access.

How managers purposefully use PI is a key to understand the potential impact of self-assessments.