Paper info

The development of a new network for eco-sustainability: the Loccioni's "Leaf Community" project

Andrea Perna , Enrico Baraldi and Gian Luca Gregori

The paper was published at the 25th IMP-conference in Marseille, France in 2009.

This work-in-progress presents our preliminary findings from an ongoing study of the "Leaf House" project, initiated by Loccioni Group, an Italian mid-sized firm. "Leaf House" is part of a bigger project called "Leaf Community", aiming to create the first ecologically sustainable integrated community in Italy. The idea was proposed by Loccioni, in collaboration with Enel and Whirlpool, who created together with a network of other companies this community in the Marche region of Italy. In the Leaf Community it is possible to live in a zero carbon emission house (the Leaf House) and move with electrical or hydrogen cars and work in eco-compatible buildings. With its six apartments, the Leaf House is a technologically innovative building that relies on environment-friendly solutions: it integrates for instance innovative solutions for an efficient production and use of light and energy. The aim of this paper is to analyze, in a dynamic context like the new technologies applied to eco-sustainability, the origin and the development of the Leaf House network. Loccioni Group has engaged and mobilized a network of other actors in order to carry out the project so to involve and combine several technical and organizational resources. It is therefore interesting to investigate the interactions between the actors in this network, including the conflicts that emerged among them and how these conflicts were handled by the various actors. Other key questions are: How could a smaller firm such as Loccioni convince larger actors such as Enel or Whirlpool to participate? What were the motivations and expected gains of the various actors in relation to the creation and distribution of a key value such as eco-sustainability? How does this restricted project network relate from a technical and an organizational point of view to the broader network that embeds the various actors? From a theoretical perspective, in order to answer these questions we rely on the ARA model (Håkansson & Snehota, 1995), but we focus on the resource layer and apply the 4-Resources model (Håkansson & Waluszewski, 2002) in order to further analyze how different resources have been combined and activated within the network of the Leaf House project.