Harrie Vredenburg

Proactive corporate environmental strategy and the development of competitively valuable organizational capabilities

This article presents the results of a study conducted in two phases within a single industry context. The first phase involved comparative case studies to ground the applicability of the resource-based view of the firm within the domain of environmental responsiveness. The second phase involved testing the relationships observed during the case studies through a mail survey. It was found that strategies of proactive responsiveness to the uncertainties inherent at the interface between the business and ecological issues were associated with the emergence of unique organizational capabilities. These capabilities, in turn, were seen to have implications for firm competitiveness.

Tipping Toward Sustainability: Emerging Pathways of Transformation

This article explores the links between agency, institutions, and innovation in navigating shifts and large-scale transformations toward global sustainability. Our central question is whether social and technical innovations can reverse the trends that are challenging critical thresholds and creating tipping points in the earth system, and if not, what conditions are necessary to escape the current lock-in. Large-scale transformations in information technology, nano- and biotechnology, and new energy systems have the potential to significantly improve our lives; but if, in framing them, our globalized society fails to consider the capacity of the biosphere, there is a risk that unsustainable development pathways may be reinforced. Current institutional arrangements, including the lack of incentives for the private sector to innovate for sustainability, and the lags inherent in the path dependent nature of innovation, contribute to lock-in, as does our incapacity to easily grasp the interactions implicit in complex problems, referred to here as the ingenuity gap. Nonetheless, promising social and technical innovations with potential to change unsustainable trajectories need to be nurtured and connected to broad institutional resources and responses. In parallel, institutional entrepreneurs can work to reduce the resilience of dominant institutional systems and position viable shadow alternatives and niche regimes.

Corporate Environmental Responsiveness Strategies The Importance of Issue Interpretation and Organizational Context

This article analyzes the environmental responsiveness strategies of seven companies in the Canadian oil industry over a 15-year period, during which environmental issues gained increasing public and regulatory attention. These within-industry corporate case comparisons serve as the basis for developing an understanding of corporate environmental responsiveness that centers on the relationships between issue interpretations and strategic responses as well as the role of antecedent organizational context elements.

Strategic Bridging: A Role for the Multinational Corporation in Third World Development:

The traditional lending paradigms adopted by international development funding agencies have not been very successful in fostering genuine economic development at the grassroots level in developing Third World countries. Despite good intentions on the part of these multilateral agencies, they sometimes lack perspectives on the unique social, cultural, and ecological conditions affecting development in these countries. Multinational corporations with a more permanent presence and long-term commitment of resources in these countries have egoistic interests in long-term relationship building with stakeholders in host Third World countries. They can provide collaborative mechanisms for partnering international development funding agencies to foster grassroots development efforts in developing countries. Collaboration theory and the concept of strategic bridging as a unique form of collaboration are used as frameworks to analyze a case study involving the role of a multinational firm as an unofficial strategic bridge between an international development bank and a state government in a West African country to bring about a successful outcome to an infrastructural funds lending exercise.

An Empirical Study of Factors Influencing Innovation Implementation in Industrial Sales Organizations

The authors formulate and test a model of organizational factors leading to successful implementation of the telemarketing innovation. Data to test the model were collected by interviewing two key informants in each of 110 industrial salesforces. Support was found for many of the individual hypotheses in the model. Preliminary conclusions are drawn for marketing management and theory.

Collaborating for sustainability: strategic knowledge networks, natural resource management and regional development

Many firms have turned to strategies based on collaborative initiatives with stakeholders to generate the valuable knowledge resources needed to be successful in todays global economy. Firms in natural resource-based industries such as mining, energy and forestry, which typically provide the backbone for regional development in their production locations, have become leaders in establishing innovative sustainability initiatives that integrate a range of stakeholder interests. Using a case-based inductive theory-building approach, this paper presents a model of a strategic knowledge network based on collaboration between firms in Canadas west coast forest products industry and their stakeholders. It presents a three-phase model with the important knowledge creating variables, the knowledge resources accruing from the network, and the performance implications for the firms. The model has value for firms in other resource-based industries that face stakeholder conflicts and are working to incorporate sustainability principles into their strategies.

The new role of law in stimulating industrial innovation and regional development: the Canadian experience with reflexive law in reconciling economic development, environmental protection and entrepreneurship in the energy industry

Social and environmental pressures are having a profound effect on natural resource firms and regional development. The traditional application of law has fallen short in addressing these new societal pressures. This paper uses an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on management and legal scholarship, to explain how stakeholder generated managerial knowledge creation and innovation may be stimulated by innovative approaches to the application of natural resources law. Using the Canadian oil and gas industry as a case study, the article shows that this new managerial knowledge, in turn, provides firms and the regional industry with competitive advantage. In resource-based regional economies facing pressure from global societal calls for sustainable development, law and how it is applied is a critical variable in fostering corporate innovation and regional development.

Towards a model of wind energy industry development in industrial and emerging economies

Through the development and analysis of four in-depth case studies of the emergence of wind power industries in two industrialised and two emerging economies, the authors develop a model of sustainable energy industry development. The model demonstrates that fundamental economic indicators are insufficient for explaining new industry development. Environmental, institutional and cultural factors idiosyncratic to individual jurisdictions play important roles in the emergence of renewable energy industries in both industrialised and emerging economies. The model makes contributions to institutional and strategic change theories and has implications for policy makers and managers.

The Perils of Precision: Managing Local Tensions to Achieve Global Goals

This article examines a case of managing local change to achieve global goals. The rapid disappearance of species worldwide has produced a completely new mission for many North American zoos: that of acting as the arks for endangered species. Such change in focus is tied to changes in technology, structure, specialization, and competitive context. From a local park offering recreation to local citizens and competing with other local amusement parks, zoos must attempt to become global arks offering conservation to endangered species and cooperating with other zoos at the national and international level. This article presents the case of one North American zoo and its directors success in overcoming the operational tensions inherent in these two competing definitions of the zoos mission. The article concludes with a discussion of precision and ambiguity and their role in managing local change in a global context.

Collaborative competitors in a fast–changing technology environment: open innovation in environmental technology development in the oil and gas industry

The open innovation model has been the topic of many studies, but studies of applications of the model in resource-based industries are scarce. In this research, we examine the deployment of the open innovation model in resource-based industries through the case of the Canadian oil and gas sector. Our findings show that the need for technical innovation is rapidly increasing as a result of the nature of the new complex fossil fuel reservoirs the industry is now developing. High research and development costs, long development cycles, resistance to change and high technical risk, we find, are obstacles hindering the development of new innovative technologies. In response to these challenges to innovation, the Canadian industry experimented with a unique model of open innovation by establishing an industry-level organisation. In this study, we explore this emerging model of open innovation and interpret its successes and failures through the use of the theoretical literature. The conceptual model that we derive combines strategic bridging organisational concepts with open innovation ideas to help us understand the building of an innovative technologies network at the industry level.