Untangling the knots: Understanding the mechanisms to achieve Sustainability Oriented Innovation through Supply Chain Orchestration

Nowadays, achieving sustainable development is of utmost importance for companies, especially in industries that generate significant environmental and social impacts such as textile and fashion ones. In this regard, Circular Economy (CE) has widely been recognized as a promising alternative to the current linear production and consumption models aimed at minimizing waste production and resource consumption through system-wide innovation, specifically Sustainability-Oriented Innovation (SOI). Companies thus need to implement transformative changes at the supply chain level by involving a variety of actors within and across their organizational boundaries to build the Circular Supply Chain (CSC). Adopting a Resource Orchestration (RO) perspective offers the potential to achieve the Triple-Bottom Line (TBL) sustainability performance. The extant literature lacks examples of companies that succeeded in implementing CE principles as well as practical information on the strategies that firms should adopt to effectively orchestrate resources and capabilities for SOI in the context of CSCs. To address these gaps, the present work carries out a longitudinal field study with embedded cases on a sustainable fashion company to investigate the RO mechanisms implemented for the successful development of different SOI projects. Hence, valuable insights on the strategies and practices for achieving a TBL sustainability performance are provided and a RO framework for SOI in the CSC context is developed. Moreover, an approximative methodology is proposed to assess the impacts of SOI projects on the TBL sustainability performance. Finally, the findings highlight the importance of adopting different RO mechanisms for different SOI projects. Therefore, besides contributing to knowledge accumulation at the intersection of research on CE, SOI and RO, this study provides a number of practical implications for companies that strive to transition towards a CE.