Search

Although corporate social innovation studies in developing countries acknowledge the importance of firm resources and capabilities for attaining social goals, they overlook the way in which these interact with broader institutions to generate successful outcomes. We address this gap by exploring the relationship between firm resources-capabilities and institutions that is conducive to meeting both business and social interests in developing countries. By employing a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis of corporate social innovation projects performed by joint ventures of Dutch SMEs and their local partners in developing countries, we show that firm resources and/or capabilities complement strong institutions in these countries. Corporate social innovation can also be facilitated by firm capabilities in running highly legitimate projects that substitute institutional voids in these economies, attesting to multiple paths that corporations can take to achieve social innovation.

This paper is amongst the first to examine coopetition strategy for sustainable development at the network level. Companies who want to successfully implement complex innovative technologies that support sustainable development need to collaborate with other actors of the innovation ecosystem, including their competitors, so that they can develop standards, interoperable products, pool knowledge, and resources and bundle forces to compete against other technologies. Collaboration with competitors brings benefits, but also many risks. We investigated how firms cope with these risks when establishing an innovation ecosystem to implement a new technology in society. We conducted research in the Dutch smart grids sector and explored how these firms minimize inherent risks of coopetition. We found that system-building actors in the Dutch smart grid field not only minimize inherent risks, but from the start of their collaboration they implement so-called enablers to prevent these risks upfront.

The implementation of innovative sustainability technologies often requires far reaching changes of the macro environment in which the innovating firms operate. Strategic management literature describes that firms who want to commercialize an innovative technology can collaborate in networks or industry clusters to build up a favourable environment for their technology. This increases the chances of successful diffusion and adoption of the technology in society. However, the strategic management literature does not offer advice on how to strategically build up this supportive external environment. We fill this gap with complementary insights from the technological innovation systems literature. We introduce the concept of strategic collective system building. Collective system building describes processes and activities networks of actors can strategically engage in to collectively build up a favourable environment for their innovative sustainability technology. Furthermore, we develop a strategy framework for collective system building. To underpin the theoretical analysis empirically, we conducted a case study in the Dutch smart grids field. The resulting strategy framework consists of four key areas for strategy making: technology development and optimization, market creation, socio-cultural changes and coordination. Each of these key strategic areas is composed of a set of system building activities