Meta-organizing firms’ capabilities for sustainable innovation: a conceptual framework

Abstract

Organizing practices at the collective level of firms and entrepreneurs, i.e. ‘meta-organizing’, is a necessity for the development and diffusion of sustainable innovations. This paper seeks to build a meta-organization approach of sustainable innovation's governance. To do so, we conducted a three-stage literature review and analysis to 1) identify organizational capabilities that businesses need to acquire to develop sustainable innovations, 2) uncover attributes of meta-organizations as devices for governance, 3) relate these attributes to the capabilities for sustainable innovations. Our contributions are twofold: first we build a more comprehensive understanding of organizational capabilities, insisting on the overlooked importance of accountability, in addition to existing literature on anticipation, resilience, reflexivity, responsiveness and inclusion. Second, we highlight the key role of meta-organizations in facilitating the meta-governance of these capabilities. We propose a research agenda to further investigate these issues in several families of meta-organizations.