Sustainability change management in inter-organizational innovation networks

Abstract Managing sustainability-oriented organizational changes has received increasing attention in the international literature from the perspectives of corporations and universities. Nevertheless, researching sustainability change management (SCM) from the perspective of the cooperation of corporations and universities, especially the underlying factors of the cooperation, remained overlooked until now. Based on the change management (CM) literature, this research focuses on an international inter-organizational network with universities and corporations, and empirically studies their autonomous SCM characteristics and the collaborative planning dynamics of a sustainability-led innovation (SLI) project. Results show that SLIs cannot only come from SCM strategies, but emerging opportunities within inter-organizational networks could also induce them. Important contextual factors of CM, i.e., regarding strategy, structure, and capabilities, however, could and should be interpreted during SCM and SLI project planning, as these underlying factors force cooperation partners to compromise with each other in project scope. The results suggest that compromises could not undertake autonomous strategy alignment or capability building, only minor changes in the project scope which will still allow leveraging existing capabilities or require a few additional structural coordination mechanisms. The findings contribute to the literature by highlighting empirical examples of inter-organizational SLI challenges, deriving from autonomous balancing needs during SCM.