In the dynamic economic environment where knowledge is vastly distributed companies can no longer rely on their own research and are pushed to utilize outside sources to sustain growth. At the same time food industry involves large number of horizontal and vertical relationships, the very dynamic nature of these relationships play role in innovation. The primary purpose of the research is to study interactions and relations between stakeholders in food industry, particularly in Sweden, to gain an understanding of the driving forces for development in food processing and packaging technologies. Also gain insight into the innovation process at major Packaging solution provider (PSP) and Process equipment manufacturers (PEM), their interaction, collaboration and information sharing with food manufacturing companies (FMC). Study shows the views of industry experts strongly reflect that the role of suppliers of processing and packaging in food industry is "contractual" in nature, whereas ingredient suppliers tend to be more mature partners in the innovation process. The innovation process at major food machinery and packaging companies corresponds well to the 'food-machinery framework' of open innovation (Bigliardi et al., 2010). It is apparent that food industry is taking steps to integrate external knowledge sources in the innovation process, still suppliers continues to play limited strategic role in innovation. This study shows that some barriers to collaboration were identified and they can be grouped into two types: technical and perspective. Technical factors constitute lack of technical expertise amongst food manufacturer, requirement for legal framework and difficulty in predicting future needs.

Sustainable entrepreneurship, that is, venturing with the aim of contributing to a shift of practices towards environmental and social sustainability, is an increasingly prominent phenomenon. This article investigates how sustainability ventures orient between dual – commercial and environmental – logics when conducting the legitimation work necessary to secure their first major partnership with an incumbent firm. Specifically, we study multiple cases of partnerships on food waste reduction. This setting is characterised by limited tension between the two logics, which implies that ventures are not forced into hybridity. We find some indications that ventures are able to draw on both types of logic to legitimate their ventures. However, the dominant pattern is that sustainability ventures tend to orient their legitimation work around a salient founding logic. Our analysis suggests that this pattern can be attributed partly to organisational imprinting, but also to legitimation work in this context being inherently logic-specific to a significant degree. This seems to be particularly true for ventures with a salient environmental logic.

Firms configure their sustainability-oriented partnerships differently depending on the sustainability issue, partnership types, and mechanisms (product, process, policy, and awareness raising) and target change at various levels (firm, industry, supply chain, and society). We study how sustainability-oriented partnerships in the textile industry are configured by analyzing 444 partnerships using a mixed-method approach. Textile firms partner to tackle environmental issues such as circularity, waste, and sustainable materials, utilizing product and process mechanisms and create firm-level change. In contrast, these firms address social issues such as education and job development, labor and working conditions, poverty, and inequality through cross-sector partnerships that target change beyond firm boundaries. We discuss these findings critically by drawing on and contributing to two literature areas: sustainability-oriented partnerships that study partnership configurations and the sustainability in textiles. Our findings highlight the importance of issue and context specificity when partnering for sustainability.

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Firms engage in partnerships to address various sustainability issues such as greenhouse gas emissions, cleaner production, labour rights or working conditions in their operations and throughout their supply chains. These partnerships utilise various mechanisms that can be seen as enablers of change, including product development, process enhancements, policy-related initiatives and awareness-raising campaigns. Through these mechanisms, partnerships can seek to achieve change at the firm, industry, supply chain and societal levels. This paper studies the relationship between these mechanisms and firms' targeted level of change in textiles/fashion. We analyse 444 sustainability partnerships using a mixed-method approach. We find that partnerships targeting these broader levels focus more on social sustainability issues in this industry. Those targeting society-level partnerships involve cross-sector partners. Our study adds to the conversations about sustainability-oriented partnerships by demonstrating how mechanism-change dynamics can be contextual and industry-specific.