Paper info

Collaborative development for sustainable solutions in the textile industry

Mônica Abreu, FABIANA FERREIRA and Joao Proenca

The paper was published at the 35th IMP-conference in Paris, France in 2019.

This paper investigates how sustainable initiatives are developed as a collaborative result of business-to-business solutions. Managers in firms need to understand the opportunities for cooperative value creation that their business ecosystems enable. Besides that, a solution can be understood as, in itself, a discourse on the market and its evolution, or as market scripting. The paper takes together these approaches to describe how a manufacturing firm can develop sustainable solutions as a network-developed process. The concept of the network-based sustainable solution is presented as relational development among stakeholders in a business network. Qualitative and exploratory research is applied in the Brazilian textile industry as a case where sustainable products are increasingly relevant for competitiveness. We developed in-depth interviews with managers from textile companies, garments and trade association. Extending conventional dyadic analysis, relationships developed for sustainable initiatives with network actors as local government, industry associations, unions and firms on financial system are analysed. Findings highlight that managers need to focus not only on the product per se but on developing relationships with partners that enable providing sustainable solutions over time. The paper contributes to the discussion that sustainable initiatives are dynamically developed among actors in a business network.