Collaboration process of Sustainability-Oriented Innovation (SOI) initiatives: a case study

The need for a sustainability transition at every scale is undeniable. Recognizing that companies control most of the productive resources globally available, an operationalizing framework is needed to allow the implementation of sustainable actions within their businesses. Achieving sustainability goals will require a multi faceted innovation perspective, including the organization’s philosophy and values, as well as its products, processes, practices, and business models (Adams et al., 2016). These reflections suggest that sustainability-oriented innovations (SOIs) will be the natural evolution of the innovation concept, given that all the innovations are required to make their environmental, social and economic impacts explicit (Inigo & Albareda, 2019). The framework proposed by Adams et al. (2016) frames this complex concept that goes beyond traditional market-oriented innovation, also covering new organizational culture and values that have an overall net positive impact by addressing environmental, social, and economic goals. Within this framework, the systems building (SOI-SB) approach endorses the implementation of radical changes that impact not only the internal operations of a company or initiator of the innovative initiative but also the external context, by transforming traditional business practices and strategies in ways that fully embed the sustainability concept (Ayuso et al., 2011). This fact evidences the imperative need for creating collaboration networks among different stakeholders (Adams et al., 2016; Inigo & Albareda, 2019). The SOI-SB concept is about reframing the purpose of business in society into “doing good by doing new things with others” (Adams et al., 2016, p. 190). Given that the stakeholders involved differ in their nature and purposes (Goodman et al., 2017), it is a complicated task for the initiator to set up and manage the collaboration process on the SOI-SB initiatives. Such innovation processes are recognized to be dynamic and iterative (Carrillo-Hermosilla et al., 2010). However, the literature is scant in describing the stages and the stakeholders involved in developing innovative initiatives. In particular, we refer to collaboration processes as the set of all the activities, stages and interactions that take place among the initiator company and the other companies involved in the development of the innovative product, process or service. Given the novelty of the topic and the need to deepen the understanding of the SOI-SB collaboration process that stakeholders undertake while developing successful initiatives, this research tries to fill in this gap within the related literature.