A Review of key dimensions for designing environment-driven collaboration practices with external business partners

Abstract

Environmental sustainability challenges are of growing interest in the business world and collaboration with external business partners is considered a key means to tackle them. Nevertheless, collaborating with external business partners to develop and deliver greener products and services is not straightforward for companies, and recommendations from academia, as well as industry practices remain scarce. Guidance is needed for designing collaboration practices and their implementation when developing and delivering greener products and services. Pursuing this aim, the present paper reviews environmental management literature fields and extracts indications regarding practices of such collaboration with external business partners. We outline three key dimensions affecting collaboration practices and their implementation and consolidate them in a framework. We suggest that tailored implementation approaches should be based on the clarification of the company’s objective for collaboration, the company's organizational profile for collaboration and the company’s value network context. As a final point, we derive needs for further research.