Responsible management competences are the skills of managers to deal with the triple bottom line, stakeholder value and moral dilemmas. In this paper, we analyse how managers develop responsible management competences and how the competences interact with capabilities at the organisational level. The paper contributes to the responsible management literature by integrating research on absorptive capacity and organisational learning. By creating intersections between these disparate research streams, this study enables a better understanding of the development of responsible management competences. The paper is a systematic literature review on environmental competences, which are a type of responsible management competences referring to the managerial skills aimed at improving environmental sustainability. The findings demonstrate that managers who are able to recognize and acquire external knowledge develop environmental competences, and organisations capable of assimilating, transforming and exploiting knowledge develop environmental capabilities. The paper establishes that a dynamic and recursive relation exists between environmental competences and capabilities. Antecedents and contextual conditions specific to a sustainability context, such as eco-centric values and stakeholder pressures, influence the development of environmental competences. The study shows that environmental competences have a positive direct effect on environmental performance, and an indirect effect as a mediator between environmental capabilities and performance.

The business case for a sustainable firm, in particular the business case for new entrepreneurial initiatives responding to environmental demands, is increasingly receiving attention from practitioners and scholars. This article contributes to existing literature on business models, sustainable development and entrepreneurship, by applying components of business models to the practices of entrepreneurs that have a goal of environmental sustainability and a focus on the mass market (i.e. ecopreneurs). We define the ecopreneurial business model and specify four varieties of this business model, which consist of different combinations of environmental scope and a focus on the mass market and profitability. The distinguishing factor of the ecopreneurial business model is that it transforms disvalue into value, thereby creating greater customer value for environmentally concerned consumers. The results are based on a substantial set of interviews among ecopreneurs in the organic food and beverage industry in the Netherlands.

The literature on alliances has identified a variety of inter‐firm antecedents of performance, including information and knowledge sharing between partners, shared partner understanding, and a focus on collective objectives. Recent studies have focused on alliance management capabilities (AMC) – firms' abilities to capture, share, store and apply alliance management knowledge – as an important antecedent of performance. This paper reviews 90 studies on AMC and makes two important contributions to the literature. First, the review provides an overview of and classification scheme for the different types of AMC to better organise the diverse empirical findings that have been presented in the literature. The novel classification distinguishes between general and partner‐specific AMC and between AMC stored within the firm and within the alliance. Second, consistent with the dynamic capabilities perspective, this paper offers a more detailed understanding of why AMC improve performance, by highlighting the intermediate impact of AMC on alliance attributes. In particular, the review demonstrates how the different categories of AMC influence alliances in terms of information and knowledge‐sharing between partners, shared partner understanding and the pursuit of collective goals. The review also demonstrates that these attributes improve performance. The authors note promising avenues for future empirical research that involve combining the classification scheme with research on the impact of AMC on alliance attributes and performance.

The promotion of renewable energy production requires the cooperation of previously unrelated actors. In the Netherlands, a government subsidy pushes biomethane producers into a relationship with operators of the gas network. However, this cooperation proved to be very difficult. This research analyzes the problematic interaction between producers and network operators in the case of biomethane injection in the Dutch natural gas grid. We draw on the concept of 'institutional logics' to improve our understanding of this interaction and to identify divergent practices and belief systems. This research contributes to the multilevel perspective on socio-technical transitions, in particular to insights into the interaction between the biomethane niche and gas regime. Based on interviews and secondary data sources we find diverging logics for biomethane producers and network operators. The differences regarding the goals pursued, decision making style, and the scale of operations hamper productive cooperation. We also observe that 'boundary spanning' individuals step in to increase mutual understanding and to forge productive working relationships. However, the existing logics leave very little room for maneuvering, given the embeddedness and stability of logics in thinking, acting, and physical infrastructure. Mismatching institutional logics forma serious hurdle for successful biomethane injection, and thus hinder the transition towards more renewable energy production.

Collaboration between firms is important to stimulate the transition to a more sustainable society. This special volume shows that collaboration is indeed one of the preferred forms of governance to manage relations between firms in a sustainability context. Collaboration enhances sustainable benefits by creating legitimacy of sustainable technologies, reducing waste and improving environmental and social performance of firms. The institutional environment, in particular environmental laws and regulations, has a beneficial impact on collaboration and relationship management in sustainable supply chains. Two studies in this special volume show, however, that stringent environmental regulations may hinder economic performance and result in outsourcing to foreign suppliers with potential detrimental effects for environmental performance. These negative effects can be overcome by firms that invest in sustainable innovation. This special volume also shows that ecoinnovation leads to sustainable benefits, such as lower greenhouse gas emissions.