Inter-organisational collaboration in circular economy ecosystems

Resource depletion, environmental degradation and waste issues are some of the most pressing sustainability challenges of our time. These problems are largely caused by the linear economy and its so-called take–make–dispose model in which resources are wasted. A circular economy (CE) is presented as a problem-solving alternative to the linear model. The transition to a CE requires systemic cooperation and inter-organisational collaboration. Business ecosystems have recently been suggested as platforms that facilitate collaboration, but the value creation aspect of collaboration remains largely unresearched. This qualitative case study combines the two research streams of inter-organisational collaboration and stakeholder theory to analyse value creation in stakeholder relationships in inter-organisational collaboration. The empirical data were collected by interviewing seven representatives of CE ecosystems and three informants from CE expert companies in Finland in 2019–2020 and by conducting a qualitative content analysis.
Dilemma/questions: The purpose of this study is to examine how inter-organisational collaboration can foster a CE. More precisely, we analyse value creation in stakeholder relationships in inter-organisational collaboration in the context of CE ecosystems.
Theory: The study builds on the literature stream of inter-organisational collaboration and supplements it with relational stakeholder theory, which highlights joint interests, collaboration and trust in the interactions between and amongst organisations and their stakeholders.
Basis of the case: Phenomenon; inter-organisational collaboration
Type of the case: Research case
Protagonist: Not needed
Findings: Our findings indicate that inter-organisational collaboration has the potential to create four types of value for stakeholders in CE ecosystems. These are associational, transactional, interactional and synergistic value, which can all foster the transition to a CE in different ways. We also found that value creation depends on the quality of attributes of the stakeholder relationships included in the process, the maturity of the relationship and/or ecosystem and the engagement of stakeholders in value creation.
Discussions: The study has two main conclusions. First, we propose that the stronger and the more mature stakeholder relationships are in terms of the trust, the ability to collaborate and joint interests, the broader the scale of created value in CE ecosystems. Second, we propose that inter-organisational collaboration in CE ecosystems can play a key role in facilitating the transition to a CE. The study contributes to research on inter-organisational collaboration and CE by bringing together the literature streams of inter-organisational collaboration and stakeholder relationships to analyse value creation. The study suggests that further investigation could focus on examining and extending the framework on value creation in inter-organisational stakeholder collaboration proposed in this study with empirical case studies from various industry and geographical contexts.
Keywords: Circular economy, ecosystems, inter-organisational collaboration, stakeholder theory, stakeholder relationships