Searching for Alignment in Sustainability-Oriented Innovation Ecosystems: Case Carbon Capture and Storage

Abstract

Our society has faced its biggest challenge so far: The battle against ourselves to preserve what we have developed and what affects us every day. Old habits must be turned upside down. Organizational value creation must change through sustainable business model innovations towards a more collaborative approach of value co-creation. The ecosystem theory offers an attractive approach here: Organizations that contribute to sustainable innovations are part of the prevailing innovation ecosystem that includes cross-sector and/or cross-industry collaboration and competition and interdependence. However, the setup is problematic due to numerous barriers that fundamentally different actors face while they search for alignment about a focal sustainable value. Therefore, this thesis sought to find practical factors that support and threat alignment, and mechanisms by which the challenges can be facilitated in sustainability-oriented innovation ecosystems. On the other hand, the thesis had an explorative agenda to map actors, their roles and contributions to value co-creation in unexplored sustainability-oriented innovation ecosystems.

With these objectives on mind, the qualitative case study of a British carbon capture and storage project was conducted. To reach the maximum validity two interview rounds were held. The first round contained the explorative expert interviews where professionals suggested on which case should be focused. Based on the suggestions and the criteria of the thesis the East Coast Cluster was selected. Eight semi structured interviews acted as the primary data source but to enhance triangulation, web-materials were used as supplementary material. The data was analyzed in the data-driven way using thematical analysis and the ecosystem mapping technique.

First, the thesis found essential roles and a vast set of stakeholders that comprise the innovation ecosystem in question. A strong contribution of the public sector and regulation, as well as the variability of the leadership role between different actors, instead of having one distinct leadership role, was a remarkable discovery. Second, due to the common agenda, synergy benefits of the shared infrastructure, economic opportunities and favorable political environment, the level of alignment was high in the case ecosystem. On the other hand, above-normal uncertainty, dependency on the government and the timing of other projects and planning, diversity and potential conflicts of interest hindered alignment. As a result, the ecosystem-level management had taken a dynamic and adaptive form, where the aim is to create a proper environment and trust through informal cooperation, while formal cooperation is utilized in a more matured way to routine-like problem solving and fostering the project. The government has in turn utilized platform management and acted as an industry architect by building both political and technical frames and attracted actors to collaborate through incentive programs, regulation and the development of business models.

This thesis contributes theoretically to the evolution of roles during the birth of innovation ecosystems, the characteristics of sustainability-oriented innovation ecosystems, and the development of a sustainable business model and innovation ecosystem blueprint. The results encourage managers to adopt ecosystem thinking in sustainable investment projects where the key is to find the most important dependencies, roles and minimal requirements for cooperation and alignment. Future research should apply a wide range of other theories to sustainability-oriented innovation ecosystems and examine how the leadership roles and management mechanisms shift over time as such an ecosystem evolves.