Professor Anne-Marie Corriveau and her research team have carried out a literature review on inter-organizational collaboration. Discover the summary of their work.
Summary
A transition to the circular economy depends on joint strategic action by a range of stakeholders. In this context, inter-organizational collaboration is recognized as a must, but also as fraught with pitfalls that threaten the establishment or sustainability of structuring circular economy projects. To anticipate and avoid these pitfalls, it is crucial to understand how sustainable inter-organizational collaboration operates. Yet, while the circular economy literature clearly echoes this imperative, it leaves many grey areas. The main objective of this project is therefore to find out how the circular economy literature appropriates (or not) the current state of knowledge in inter-organizational collaboration. In order to identify avenues for future research and to better inform those working in the field as they move towards circular economy, a scoping review of the literature was used to analyze 140 articles on circular economy that identified IC as an essential element.
State of the literature
It should be noted that 80% of the 140 articles targeted and analyzed have been published since 2020. The majority come from technical fields in engineering (27%), operations management (20%) and environmental sciences (12%). Interestingly, while inter-organizational collaboration has been the subject of management studies for several decades, only 6% of the articles analyzed in this literature review came from management (mainly on governance and strategy). The Journal of Cleaner Production and Sustainability alone account for almost 40% of the articles analyzed. Thematically, these articles focus on circular economy in supply chains (46%), innovation ecosystems (17%) and industrial symbioses (10%). The remainder (27%) deal with circular economy in the broadest sense. Case studies are the most frequent research method, but none are documented for North America, the majority of cases being in Europe. More than half the articles listed (75/140) identify inter-organizational collaboration as a condition for success in circular economy, without going into detail on how it is implemented or the obstacles and levers involved. The balance of articles (65/140) focus on inter-organizational collaboration in the context of circular economy.
Main findings
An analysis of the 65 articles studying inter-organizational collaboration in a circular economy context reveals three distinct levels of collaboration, mainly involving three stakeholders: researchers, companies and governments, around which other players gravitate depending on the context. The following table presents these levels, which are not mutually exclusive, since they can be coordinated both horizontally (within the level) and vertically (multi-level).
| What ? | Who ? | How ? | |
| Micro level | Collaboration between researchers and companies to innovate and improve production processes within a company (e.g. eco-design). | Researchers – companies | Subsidies, networking, incubators… |
| Mezzo level | Collaboration within a sector of activity (e.g. construction, textiles, residual materials) to circularize an integrated value chain. | Companies – industry organizations – researchers – governments | Joint financial investments, technological platforms for exchange and collaboration, alternative business models… |
| Macro level | Collaboration within an ecosystem aimed at a territorial approach to circular economy (e.g. ecoparks, industrial symbioses). | Governments – companies – researchers | Policies and regulations, loans and subsidies, public investment, urban planning, infrastructure sharing, communities of practice, new organizational forms… |
The case studies identified highlight certain issues specific to inter-organizational collaboration in a circular economy context:
- The challenge of aligning multiple interests and organizational logics.
- The need for inclusive governance bodies that foster agility and synergies.
- The need to manage knowledge and share data between collaborators.
- The importance of leadership based on a shared vision that combines economic, environmental and social dimensions over the long term.
- The capacity for multi-level coordination.
Added to this is a whole list of obstacles to inter-organizational collaboration, such as: regulatory constraints, access to project financing, lack of trust and poor communication, exclusion of certain stakeholders or the absence of clear rules for collaboration. Consideration of all these elements suggests that inter-organizational collaboration models in circular economy need to be flexible and evolving according to their context and stakeholders.
Conclusion
For the most part, the body of knowledge on inter-organizational collaboration in the circular economy literature is presented “piecemeal”, without any real integration that would link them together in a processual perspective. Yet the multiple facets of inter-organizational collaboration are well documented in the management discipline, which defines it as a complex process. In this respect, the absence of references to seminal inter-organizational collaboration works (e.g. Gray and Bryson) in the corpus studied is surprising. Our analysis suggests both a recognition by researchers of the need for inter-organizational collaboration, but also a tendency to oversimplify the complex dynamics underlying it. Integrating the processual dimension of inter-organizational collaboration would make it possible to better support actors at every stage of their move towards circular economy. This is the focus of our future work.
