Harnessing digitalization for sustainable development: Understanding how interactions on sustainability‐oriented digital platforms manage tensions and paradoxes

Abstract

In the digital age, interactions among heterogenous actors are increasingly mediated by digital platforms. While sustainability‐oriented digital platforms (SODPs) have the potential to accelerate sustainability through increased connectivity, knowledge sharing, and co‐creation, they also have a dark side, leading to unexpected tensions and paradoxical effects that may risk the creation of value for societal actors. Understanding how digital platforms can be designed to stimulate fruitful interactions among participants without succumbing to their paradoxical effects is still an unresolved puzzle. In this paper, we examine how the bright sides of SODPs can be brought to light while reducing their associated tensions and paradoxes through a qualitative study of micro‐level knowledge integration interactions on an open platform to tackle food waste. Our analysis identified 11 distinct mechanisms and 3 main interactional patterns through which participants framed the scale of the sustainability problem, mobilized resources for their solutions, and generated breadth and diversity of knowledge on the platform to tackle the problem of food waste. Our study contributes to research on SOPDs by showing how participants can take on a “distributed brokering” role through their interactions on the platform. We also provide implications to policy‐oriented practitioners regarding platform design choices to help manage known paradoxes and tensions of SOPDs.

Co-Design for Novelty Anchoring Into Multiple Socio-Technical Systems in Transitions: The Case of Earth Observation Data

“…The heterogeneity between these socio-technical systems complexifies the range of potential actors to be involved in the design process, thus requiring supplementary efforts to identify and frame the relevant setting for subsequent collective design sessions. This multi-system perspective on co-design also echoes recent advances in other streams of works in innovation management, especially calling for further research on open innovation processes expanding the concept of openness (initially related to knowledge exchange across organisational boundaries) towards openness at an industry or larger societal scale [12], [14], [74], in which digital technologies play a specific role in crossing existing boundaries [75], [76].…”

Sustainability in the digital age: Intended and unintended consequences of digital technologies for sustainable development

“…While these technologies encourage citizen engagement and generate tax savings, they also lead to privacy concerns due to the storage of personal information in the cloud. As Hellemans et al (2021) illustrate, the very design of digital technologies and the interactions they facilitate could also create entirely new paths (Point 4). In their qualitative study of a digital platform to tackle food waste, they show that the platform's design choices are key not only to stimulate engagement but also to avoid entirely unintended consequences such as discrimination and bad working conditions.…”

Managing tensions in sustainable development in Chinese and New Zealand business partnerships: Integrative approaches

“…In recent years, there has been an increasing amount of literature on tensions in sustainability in business contexts (Chen et al, 2021; Fontana et al, 2021; Greer et al, 2021; Hasna, 2007; Hellemans et al, 2021), which can be illustrated from the following three sustainability areas: strategic, intertemporal, and instrumental and moral tensions.…”

“…In relation to strategies for managing the tensions, while a paradoxical approach has only recently emerged, research on it needs further investigation and it is still nascent (Ozanne et al, 2016;Somlai, 2022;Van der Byl & Slawinski, 2016), and there is still little research on the specific forms of paradoxical responses to tensions in sustainability (Edwards, 2021;Hahn et al, 2018;Hellemans et al, 2021). Moreover, the recent studies which examine the paradoxical approach in sustainability tension management mainly focused on conceptual development, while empirical work is still in its infancy (Brix-Asala et al, 2021;Hahn et al, 2015Hahn et al, , 2016, particularly lacking investigation in specific contexts (Fontana et al, 2021;Smith & Tracey, 2016).…”