Open Collaboration and Digital Technologies in the Context of Environmental Innovations

Abstract

Digital technologies are a valuable strategy for finding, identifying, combining and integrating external knowledge, as well as for generating new organizational forms to develop innovative solutions. At the same time, digital technologies are allowing a more active collaboration and interaction among companies, communities of experts, and consumers in order to address environmental-oriented innovation challenges. Environmental innovation refers to the development of new or improved products and the creation of new processes and business models that bring benefits to the natural environment. In that sense, the main objective of this study is to discuss, from a conceptual perspective, how digital technologies promote open collaboration processes to achieve environmental innovations. We analyze crowdsourcing, customer co-development, and R&D alliances as mechanisms to achieve Sustainable Development Goals in general, and environmental-oriented innovations in particular. Our study expands the argument that collaboration with outsiders is a key capability to advance toward environmental innovation and to acquire and provide unique resources and knowledge to facilitate the environmental innovation process.