Project

Inventive activity: how companies design their future products

When do companies change their inventive trajectories discontinuing environmentally harmful inventions in favor of more sustainable ones? We investigate this question using the chemical industry as a context, and the pesticide (agro-chemical) technological domain more specifically. While we are surrounded by thousands of chemical compounds, pesticides are one class of chemicals that have become increasingly contested in the public, academic, and political spheres for their negative impacts on nature and health. Such contestation can, in turn, be very detrimental to firms in the agrochemical industry. To investigate under what conditions and how firms are more likely to disengage from their investments in contested compounds, we will put together a large database that matches patent trajectories in the agrochemical industry to regulatory, scientific or public contestation of pesticide compounds.

Process innovation: how companies transform their production processes

Becoming more sustainable might require companies to heavily transform their production processes, especially in very impactful industries such as leather and apparel. Other than being more costly, the cleaner production processes may be incompatible with incumbent dirtier processes, leading firms to a slow process of substitution, which, in the meantime, is likely to undermine the prospects for a sustainable production. By investigating production practices in the leather industry, we aim at understanding under which conditions companies abandon production processes that prove detrimental for the environment or, rather, they keep investing in dirty processes, and how they manage the tensions emerging in the transition between dirty to cleaner production processes.

Organizational innovation: how companies reorganize their value chains

Nowadays most firms are part of (global) value chains, where leading (global) firms coordinate huge networks of suppliers which produce a component of the final product. Firms operating within value chains are independent actors (i.e. they do not own each other), yet their performance heavily depends on the standards achieved by the other companies in the chain (e.g. in terms of quality of inputs, outputs, socio-environmental standards, prices, delivery times and quality). However, since each actor in the chain may pursue different goals and respond to different incentives, they may likely adopt different approaches to address sustainability tensions – leading to a misalignment of goals with the chain. This project aims at understanding how different roles in the value chain impact actors’ perception of tensions, and how this changes their course of action.