Motivations for Environmental Alliances: Generating and Internalizing Environmental and Knowledge Value

Abstract

Environmental alliances are a common response to societal sustainability demands. In environmental alliances, firms collaboratively exploit and explore environmental technologies to address market opportunities while simultaneously generating positive environmental impacts. A striking idiosyncrasy is that in addition to economic value, environmental alliances generate two types of external value: environmental value from positive effects on air, water, land and biodiversity, and knowledge value from innovations in environmental technologies. Research on motivations for environmental alliances is dispersed and underdeveloped compared to the well-established literature on motivations for strategic alliances that emphasize economic value. This study therefore develops a classification of motivations for environmental alliances by combining the literature on strategic alliances and that on environmental and knowledge value. The resulting classification includes motivations for environmental alliances to generate environmental and knowledge value as well as motivations to create economic value by internalizing environmental and knowledge value. A systematic review of 123 articles on environmental inter-firm alliances identifies specific motivations to populate the new classification. We show that alliance partners are motivated to share sustainable resources, reduce sustainability risk, respond to stakeholders or invest in specific sustainable assets to generate external value. They collaborate to reduce costs or enhance competitive advantage, reputation or legitimacy to internalize external value. The resource-based view, resource-dependence view, institutional theory and transaction cost economics have not previously distinguished between motivations to generate and internalize external value. We extend their area of application from strategic alliances to environmental alliances, and thus beyond the exclusive pursuit of economic value. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

Jump‐starting, diffusing, and sustaining the circular economy

“…Diffusing circularity‐oriented practices beyond a small subset of exemplar firms necessitates a host of enabling factors, but the exemplar firms can aid this process by taking an ecosystem approach and by cultivating collective capacities of their ecosystem partners. Previous research (e.g., Niesten et al, 2017; Niesten & Jolink, 2020) shows that interfirm collaboration is crucial to system‐wide improvements that the circular economy entails. Articles included in this special issue reinforce the importance of collaboration because it helps firms in generating multidimensional value through circular economy initiatives around which multiple stakeholders coalesce.…”

“…Previous research (e.g., Niesten et al, 2017;Niesten & Jolink, 2020) shows that interfirm collaboration is crucial to system-wide improvements that the circular economy entails. Articles included in this special issue reinforce the importance of collaboration because it helps firms in generating multidimensional value through circular economy initiatives around which multiple stakeholders coalesce.…”

Does better environmental, social, and governance induce better corporate green innovation: The mediating role of financing constraints

“…Thus, ESG may cultivate creative thinking for corporate green innovation. Second, in the process of fulfilling ESG responsibilities to achieve sustainable development, firms may absorb diversified external knowledge and technology through interaction with stakeholders (e.g., employees, investors, analysts, suppliers, consumers, and media) and introduce them into production to implement green production practices (Niesten & Jolink, 2020). Thus, ESG may cultivate knowledge-absorption capacity and inter-organizational learning capacity for corporate green innovation.…”

Frugal innovation and sustainability outcomes: findings from a systematic literature review

“…Similarly, frugal innovations producing both economic and non-economic outcomes have most likely experienced a form of cross-partner collaboration during their adoption, with one actor identifiable as key driver and others supporting the process of adoption in multiple ways. More empirical evidence is needed, however, to critically study how the complementarities in resources/capabilities of these various types of actors might influence the sustainability of frugal innovations, taking stock of the potential conflicts arising, and assessing the role played by each actor in these collaborations and the costs and benefits of each, in line with the evidence emerging from studies focusing, for example, on environmental innovations (Melander, 2018; Niesten and Jolink, 2020; Watson et al. , 2018).…”