Collaboration practices in the fashion industry: Environmentally sustainable innovations in the value chain

Abstract

Global fashion represents one of the most economically relevant contemporary industrial activity, but is fraught with sustainability problems. As a response, the fashion industry has turned its attention towards environmentally sustainable innovation. In many cases, such innovations require collaborative development, which by its turn highlight various difficulties associated with stakeholder collaboration. This study contributes to the literature on sustainable innovation by describing established processes for developing green environmentally sustainable innovations in a collaborative manner. Specifically, it intends to understand how drivers and inhibitors for stakeholder integration are disordered and reorganized in different situations, creating examples of systems that link interorganizational elements and events. We combine a large-scale systematic literature review with two case studies. Drivers and inhibitors of stakeholder collaboration from previous literature were identified and critically assessed in the case studies, which allowed us to reorganize the previous findings from the literature using insights from the case studies. The results point out that the main drivers are related to external and competitive environment pressures, search for competitive advantage, and joint development of resources and capabilities.