Inter-organizational cooperation for greener products and services

The business world experiences an increasing attention to sustainability topics. In response to their stakeholders’ concerns or following their own aspirations, more and more companies develop their approaches to sustainability. Life-cycle thinking recommends companies to integrate their sustainability strategies into a value chain perspective in order to avoid burden shifts from one life-cycle stage to another.

Certain decisions impacting products’ and services’ life-cycle may be taken at a given company, while others are likely to be beyond the direct control of the company and require to be managed through inter-organizational interactions. Numerous scholars call for increased cooperation between companies on green issues.

On the other hand, the business world experiences a current development in sustainability approaches deeply rooted in inter-organizational cooperation such as circular business strategies, green supply chain initiatives, and target setting on a value chain level. Current literature on green management reveals that cooperation practices across companies on green issues are still rare, that implementing cooperation practices is challenging and that there is a need for shift in focus from why companies should develop sustainability strategies to how they may implement the latter.

In our on-going study, we base our approach on the contingency theory and build on inputs from academia to develop a conceptual management model aimed at supporting the discussion and reflection for a given company about its current or possible cooperation practices with other companies, in a context of greener products or services.

Moreover, this model is elaborated to support identifying the existence of companies’ archetypes towards inter-organizational cooperation. The up-to-date model is elaborated around three main areas: factors influencing cooperation practices, cooperation approaches and cooperation activities.