Proceedings of The 6th International Conference on Applied Research in Management, Business and Economics
Year: 2023
DOI:
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Preliminary Exploration of The Role of Stranger Collaboration in Delivering Sustainability – Case Studies and Comparison of Early-Stage Start-up Companies and Industrial Group Company
Can Cui, Steve Evans
ABSTRACT:
This paper is concerned with the interaction between two major trends: the rising needs of sustainability and the disruptive trend for strategic partnerships to form across borders. These trends are occurring in industrial companies with different sizes and from various sectors. We explore how industrial practitioners are choosing to collaborate with novel parties (“strangers”) to better deliver business value and sustainable value.
This paper aims to better understand the motivation, the activities and the processes of collaborations that are trying to be more sustainable. We specifically seek for the challenges and obstacles in collaborations that are seeking to co-create more value and stimulate organization’s sustainability goal. Case studies of two early-stage startup companies and one industrial group company were conducted and data were collected accordingly. Preliminary analysis reveals that some company leaders have realized the various benefits of working with organisations that they previously did not know (which we term “stranger collaboration”) and have been making efforts to form partnership with these novel parties. For example, we have observed that early-stage startup companies with very limited budget and restricted resources find it quite necessary to collaborate with strangers. However, they sometimes lack of competences in how to enable partnerships that deliver to the goal of shared sustainability.
keywords: sustainability, stranger collaboration, value, early-stage startup, industrial group