Implementing sustainability practices in b2b

The trend toward sustainability in business operations and practices in industry stimulated growing interest in research. Numerous recent studies examine the trend towards “green” products, processes and clean technologies and discuss the possibilities to exploit related business opportunities. Reaping the business opportunities appears to require integrating the two areas of sustainability and innovation not only in theory but also in business practices and require of companies to make changes internally as well as externally, in companies’ supply networks (e.g. Brindley & Lynn, 2015). Changing to more sustainable practices implies involvement of different parties and communication among these (Biggeman, Williams & Kro, 2014) and rearranging activities along with developing or recombining resources among different actors within the relevant business networks (Håkansson & Snehota, 1995). This paper focuses on the agri-food sector where sustainability concerns are diffused and lead to developing business practices also to comply with evolving European norms and regulations in the field. Societal, economic and technological changes impact the entire food processing chain, from agricultural production through food processing to the distribution to end consumers (Menrad, 2004). It has been observed that “the evolution of the agri-food system calls for a constant update of the corpus of knowledge in a continuous effort of interpreting and explaining observed behaviors in the industry” (Bonanno, 2017, p. 3). Although there is a considerable body of research on innovation in agri-food business, studies of how innovation for sustainability is actually carried out in this sector have been limited. Recent research argues that an ‘open innovation’ perspective is promising (Medeiros et al., 2016), but the research on the processes involved remains limited, even though it appears to hold significant promise of managerial and policy relevance. Therefore, this paper aims to address the following research questions: 1) How are innovation projects for sustainability initiated, developed and implemented? and, 2) Who are main actors involved in such projects and what changes/adaptations are required? Empirically the paper is based on direct participation and observation in the projects by one of the paper's authors and six interviews with the agri-food company Orto that operates in the deep-frozen vegetables industry and an institutional actor (agronomist) involved in innovation for sustainability processes in Orto. The interviews have been recorded and transcribed and have been subsequently analyzed by confronting emerging data with previous findings following an abductive logic (Dubois & Gadde, 2002). By analyzing the critical aspects and impulses of these customer-supplier relationships in developing sustainable solutions, we found that sustainability driven projects originate in and are driven by interaction with various actors external to the company. We also found that the sustainability projects are characterized by interactions and involve continuous re-formulating and adapting of the solutions brought about within the frame of the project. Finally, we found that the ‘evolutionary’ dynamics of the sustainability are driven by tensions and controversies about solutions to apply that continuously emerge among various actors involved and that third parties often have a major role. We are bound to argue that such tensions, rather than barriers to implementing sustainable business practices, are in effect the generative mechanism of sustainable practices.