Sustainability and economic growth—the integration and balance of social, environmental, and economic needs—is a salient concern for sustainable development and social well-being. By focusing on a sustainable innovation project, we explore how entrepreneurial ecosystems become sustainable entrepreneurial ecosystems and investigate the interactions of entrepreneurial actors. We conducted an inductive, single-case study of a specific collaborative innovation project in the denim industry specialized in a specific geographic location. From our data, we show that the presence of four conditional aspects foster sustainable entrepreneurial ecosystems. These include sustainability orientation of actors, recognition of sustainable opportunities and resource mobilization, collaborative innovation of sustainability opportunities, and markets for sustainable products. We make two observations that contribute to the literature. First, we see that in a sustainable entrepreneurial ecosystem, entrepreneurial experimentation is a highly interdependent and interactive process. Second, we see that recognition of sustainable opportunities is distributed among different actors in the ecosystem. Our findings also have implications for practitioners and policy-makers.
Inter-organizational arrangements that aim to address social and environmental “grand challenges” often take the form of multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs) (also cross-sector partnerships or collaborations). Grand challenges -- problems characterized by knowledge uncertainty, dynamic complexity and value conflict -- require diverse organizations to join forces to resolve them. MSIs are complex and dynamic arrangements due to the constant change occurring in the external environment and in the dynamics of the collaboration, as each participating organization may have very different frames of reference and interests that impede action and continuity. Scholars have long recognized the tensions of conflicting logics that are inherent in MSIs and the challenges that MSIs face in reconciling incongruent organizational identities, goals or shared visions. Accordingly, MSIs need facilitators (i.e., ‘orchestrators’) to navigate the persistent and pervasive challenges of both reconciling conflicting logics and using complementary logics in such a way that the collaboration achieves collective goals. Our study examines how MSI orchestrators work to meet this challenge by shaping and shifting cognitive frames in the context of a mature organizational field. We investigate the mechanisms used to enable cognitive shifts in logic and highlight the role of orchestration in enacting frame shifts. Empirically, we examine an MSI in the apparel industry that aims to guide retailers and fashion brands in the implementation of recommerce and rental business models, thereby pushing the textile and apparel industry from linear to regenerative and circular use of textile resources. We identify several frames from the perspective of diverse stakeholders and uncover the four mechanisms that orchestrators use to influence frame shifts. We also see from our findings that orchestrators efforts to influence and navigate frame shifting is both emergent and planned as they attempt to navigate and manage the tensions and complexity that arise in multi-stakeholder initiatives focused on sustainability challenges.
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The Feral Drifting with Lonja Wetlands workshop involved a 4-day feral, performative investigation of multispecies relations and spatio-temporalities of care that shape the flow of life and death in Lonjsko Polje (or Lonja Wetlands), the largest protected wetlands in Croatia. Together with 19 workshop participants, we experimented with feral ways of sensemaking that invite open-ended, multisensory, and spontaneous encounters unfolding beyond the bounds of human control.Inspired by the movements and rhythms of local, other-than-human creatures, such as storks, mosquitoes, storms, and the river Sava, as well as the artistic strategies of dérive (including their flaws), we drifted with the local ecologies and invited pathways towards care-full co-habitation. To navigate through these space-times, we experimented with various performative and speculative sense-making practices including walking, listening, storytelling and forming relations.This feral investigation resulted in co-creative outcomes – or fragments – in diverse forms, such as multispecies rituals, synesthetic maps, wayfinding games, and memory seed banks that were documented as short videos and later turned into the Feral Fragments of Lonjsko Polje film. Here, we share the key processes of our collective workshop and reflect on them in relation to the notion of feral data.
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