Project benefits co-creation: Shaping sustainable development benefits

Abstract

Sustainable development (SD) envisions business and their projects to deliver benefits to a broad group of stakeholders. Yet, projects are challenged to realize benefits to meet individual organization business objectives and value concerns. Given the benefits focus of SD, benefits realization helps to understand how SD can be integrated in the management of projects, linking it to strategy. This paper offers benefits co-creation as a strategy for creating benefits for a broad group of stakeholders reflecting holistic SD. The study presents an exploratory case study through a conceptual framework, illustrating one possible approach based on adaptation and emergence. The findings demonstrate how stakeholder co-creation enables the shaping of project SD benefits, addressing stakeholder value concerns and suggest the need to consider a two dimension conceptual approach to benefits realization—benefits creation and benefits capture, reducing the conceptual distance between projects and benefits realization.